Everyone seems to want to be a writer. And to meet the demand of all these aspiring writers wanting to learn to become writers there are myriad of books and courses on offer, depending on what kind of writer you’d prefer to be. You can become a ‘Premium Ghostwriter’ a ‘Sales Conversion writer’ an ‘online writer’ a straight-up author, a memoirist a narrative non-fiction writer. Interesting to note that most of these people offering these courses are working on their own writing careers. Things can’t be going all that well…
But why are there so many people today who want to write? There seem to be more now than ever before. When I was younger there were a handful of us who thought writing was cool. We’d read Hemingway and fantasise about become acclaimed authors who defined culture, wrote drunk and edited sober, and had more wit and sex than Jane Russell.
Today there are more newsletters, blogs and poets than there are readers. It’s odd that in a world where reading is in decline, the number of writers seems to be on the rise.
The loneliness theory
In this video from the School of Life, Alain de Botton makes the case that we all have a need to be heard and that we write in the hopes that someone out there will hear what we have to say. The video implies that we don’t have the appropriate human connections to share what we having going no inside of ourselves, and that writing has become the only avenue open to us to express our thoughts and feelings.
The ‘I don’t want a 9-5 job’ theory
There are those who believe writing can be an escape from the mundane existence of an office worker. As a writer you don’t have to present yourself each day to a soulless office, to do meaningless work that scrapes the life from you like someone digging their dinner knife into the slow-cooked beef bone to extract the soft, greasy marrow.
Instead, you work when you want to (read: have to) from the comfort of your own home, or local coffee shop, leading a carefree, boss-less, bohemian lifestyle carrying a MacBook Air in a tote with an ironic quip on the side.
If this is your reason for wanting to be a writer, very few people make a living from writing alone. Most authors I know work in tech or teach. For them, writing is a side-hustle, an artistic outlet for an itch they have to scratch.
My theory on why there are so many people who want to be writers
I believe it is a combination of the above. So many people feel the urge to write because they can’t have the conversations that matter to them. They struggle with the pointlessness of their everyday life and they don’t know anyone who wants to understand what they’re going through.
When I went to university I thought I would meet people who wanted to know things, debate ideas and find answers to questions that humanity have been struggling with for eons. University didn’t deliver any of that. Instead I drank too much, discussed all the sex we wanted to have (but weren’t) and how getting hit in the back of the head can impair one’s sense of smell.
We no longer seem to have the contexts in which to discuss our struggles with being, life and everything around us. Most of us seem to avoid these topics, instead, opting for distraction and gossip so that we don’t have to face up to our most deep seeded angsts.
Ironically, the meaningless of modern life (and the mundanity of the 9-5) is impelling many of us to question what living and life is all about, and our social architecture has boarded up all the spaces where discussing existential angst is permissible. And that is why so many of us want to write. It’s because never before have we had such and overwhelming need to find meaning and purpose in how we live, with so little opportunity to have the right conversations.
The writing epidemic is caused by our growing need to share how we experience the world and the virus of banal conversation has removed any opportunity for us to tell someone who’ll listen that things no longer make sense and that we’re afraid.
Nice one, Brucie!