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The Business of Blockheads
Why I hated writing about writing, and how I learned to like it again
A chef starting a blog can show off their recipes and photos of the food. A visual artist can write about and show their work. But a writer writing about writing… it doesn’t read right.
I don’t know when I started hating writing about writing. If I were to guess, it would probably be somewhere in the quasi-ponzi scheme of writing workshops (“Pay me and I’ll show you how to pitch!”). I can’t be mad at writers trying to make an extra buck, but do you have to go after the aspiring writers? Be like Axios, add a few 0’s, and charge it as a corporate line item.
There are also the pieces that make me want to quit writing if I’m going to turn out like this; a three-time novelist beautifully describing the humiliation of nobody going to their readings… (Book tours are terrible promotional tools, was advice I’d gotten a long time before I even tried writing my first book.) Out of respect for the publication and the novelist, I’ll skip the critical linking. The majority of links at this blog should be praising someone.
Anyway, I can tell you around when I stopped hating it, and it didn’t even take much. A few weeks ago, somewhere in between Manfred Kuehn’s Taking Note blog, which he took down, and Nicole Dieker’s…
