I hear typing! Real, live, FAST typing. Productive typing. The kind of click click clicks that are going somewhere, and ain’t stopping for no one, no how.

That’s so exciting!

It’d be more exciting if it were my typing, though. See, I’m a writer. I’m supposed to write. But I don’t. Instead I read Dooce, and I play with my puppy, and I check my email just in case something new has come in the past 30 seconds. (Nope, still nothing.) I do pretty much everything except write. Which I think means I’m a pretty bad writer.

My boyfriend, on the other hand, is writing typing. He won’t let me say he’s writing, because he’s not a writer. He published this book once, but that doesn’t count. That was a true story. (Really? I convinced someone not to jump off a roof? I don’t remember that…)

“What are you, then?” I ask him.

“What do you mean?”

“You published a book, but you say you’re not a writer. So what are you?”

He thinks for a moment. “I’m an author,” he finally answers.

Ah, it all makes sense now.

… o_O

In fairness, once you get into the semantics, it does sort of make sense. See, we writers care about the words. We experience passionate fervor for the craft, the art of writing. We labor painstakingly over each and every sentence, with our trusty Internal Editor reading over our shoulders, scrutinizing our work even in its roughest, most vulnerable forms. We have to go slowly, to ensure that we are creating the most beautiful, perfect expression of thought and emotion that we possibly can. For example, it’s taken me 4 hours to write (and italicize) this paragraph alone!

Authors, on the other hand, actually produce writing.

What this really gets down to is a difference in personalities between Andy and myself. He’s a do-er, and I’m a think-er. Okay, he’s a think-then-do-er, and I’m still just a think-er. And that’s a problem. I need to DO. More importantly, I need to FINISH. Finish my novel, finish my stories, finish my glass of water, finish this entry!

FINISH, WOMAN, FINISH!

Then I too will be a published author, and not just a writer who loves the craft.

9 responses to “The writer and the author”