You call yourself a writer, but what do you really do?

Will was the first person I knew who called himself a writer. Not my roommate Will, the pre-med who I thought was my best friend until he moved out and stopped talking to me. No, the Will I met in Paris.

He’s a lanky fellow (a former swimming champion), with long humanities-major hair that goes over his eyes, and a favorite leather jacket he always wears. And he’s from New Orleans, a Southerner. He was an international studies major, but that was for his parents. He was a writer.

It takes courage, I think, to call yourself a writer. Courage not because it is hard but because it is easy (I’m not plagiarizing from JFK’s inaugural just there, because I switched it around. He says “and we will do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard”, and the last part he says with his wonderful accent so it’s like “hahd”, in this melodic descending tone that makes me melt inside).

Everyone can say they’re a writer. And many can do it with a trace of honesty. Maybe they do write when they get home. Maybe they have several unpublished Great American novels under their beds. But a writer has to show people their stuff. And, I must admit, a writer’s stuff has to be good.

So I was impressed when Will said he was a writer. He’d published a few things, but it was more that he was a writer than that he wrote. I was in the midst of a tryst with Hem, and I was attracted to the solitary male outcast writer with mysteries fluttering in his wake and a one-euro bottle of wine in one hand and a cigarette in the other. And then Will turned me on to Faulkner, whom I had heard of, slightly, but had never read, and here was a whole new male writer of the lost generation that I could idealize and idolize.

And it made me feel less pretentious and arrogant and stupid and fruitless and conceited to sit down and write when I knew that Will, who was infinitely cooler than me, was writing too. He was cooler than me because he wore cool clothes and listened to cool music and wore a leather jacket and was from the South, and outsiders are cool.

And here’s the confession: I liked talking about writing with someone. I liked being able to talk about books and authors and have it be about the books and the authors and not about the theories and the symbolism and the metaphors. The truth is, I had never really read like that, out of school. I didn’t read for pleasure. And if I did, it was either stuff like Robert B. Parker, Harry Potter, or big biographies that my dad really likes. It was never Faulkner. It was never Hemingway. So, in a sense, though I don’t think Will really taught me much about writing, except a bit about how to be a writer, he did teach me a lot about reading.

And, he taught me about drinking, and cussing, and the mythical Southern Gentleman