Writers

Writers have problems. Writers win prizes. Writers play ping-pong, think other writers are their friends. Writers write baseball novels. Writers write war novels. Writers write about the South.

Writers make music. Writers draw. Writers take pictures of their desks. Writers should stop. When writers start a band together, nobody is happy.

Writers teach. Writers collect watches. Writers deliver mail for a year, write about delivering it. Writers have babies. Writers have agents. Writers are bald.

Writers move upstate, start literary journals. There aren’t enough journals to ignore on tables. Writers make more.

Writers can’t sell their second book. Writers can’t sell their first book. Writers quit jobs to concentrate on writing. Writers quit social media. Writers reactivate, announce new novel. Writers get mad at sexism, tell men to stop writing. Male writers ignore.

Writers go off antidepressants. Writers try to explain writing to therapists. Therapists also write. Everybody writes. Writers may be bus drivers, cab drivers, may not even be born yet. Friends say their kids write, send screenshots as proof.

Writers don’t like to write. Writers are decent writers. Writers read interviews with themselves. Writers turn off Wi-Fi. Writers are under thirty-five. Writers die.

Writers were John Updike. He was the only writer.

Writers grow up in New Jersey. Writers move to Montana. Writers move to Helsinki, Lima, Montclair. It doesn’t matter where writers are. Writers send mail.

Writers run with bulls. Writers have no balls. Writers write The Sun Also Rises. Writers write the Bible. Writers review their own books on Amazon, get caught. Writers apply to law school.

Writers get paralyzed from the neck down, dictate their next two books into puffing machine. Writers marry. Wives write memoirs about being married to writers. Husbands stay quiet, leave writers for women who don’t write. Writers write about being left, leaving, cheating, eating. Writers move to Texas.

Writers are deaf. Writers like the Mets. Writers subscribe to Poets & Writers. Writers don’t subscribe to anything. Writers are you and me and everyone we know. Writers haven’t read that book yet.

Writers realize the book is actually a movie, that some writers write books and make movies. Writers despair.

Writers strain for immortality. Writers vote for president. Writers think writing is more important than being president. Writers go to Vietnam, Afghanistan, the DMV. Writers rob banks to pay for heroin, get six-figure advance from jail.

Writers have orgasms. Writers have allergies. Writers avoid sex scenes, write “Afterwards…” Afterwards, writers pee to avoid UTIs.

Writers flinch. Writers blurb. Writers use their middle names.

Writers use the word “splay.” The word “macadam.” The term “shock of hair.” Characters pad into rooms, tromp upstairs, narrow their eyes, tiptoe gingerly down the hall.

“New way to say this?” ask writer friends.

Writers publish multigenerational Eastern European sagas, dedicated to Bubbe. Writers publish wilderness memoirs, put wilderness on the cover. Writers make characters disappear, join cults, fall down wells. Writers go nowhere. Writers buy yogurt.

Writers describe the warmth of their mothers’ tortillas. Their challah, their naan. Writers give characters miscarriages, dissertations, only one friend. Writers have seven friends, acknowledged alphabetically in the acknowledgments.

Writers snooze. Writers get up first thing and drink their coffee. Writers like to know what other writers are doing. Writers sue other writers for stealing their lives. Writers lie. Writers lie in the fetal position.

Writers live with their mom and their peacocks and never lose their virginity. Writers survive the Holocaust but kill themselves anyway.

Writers work from home. Writers work from bed. Writers rent space in a writers’ collective, get kicked out for stealing another writer’s WRITE LIKE A MOTHERFUCKER mug.

Writers rarely write like motherfuckers.

Writers check email. Writers go to the Czech Republic. Writers are bisexual midcentury realists, wear suits to their desks in the boiler room. Writers are recluse postmodernists, appear on The Simpsons. Writers wear bandanas, eyepatches, sunglasses indoors.

Writers go to rehab, come out worse writers. Writers find religion, think their new stuff is better, are wrong. Writers disappear to small-town New Hampshire, become Buddhists, drink their own piss.

Writers copy. Writers paste. Writers get million-dollar deals for books they wrote on the subway. Writers write essays called “Why I Write” and “How I Squandered My Advance.” Writers seek representation.

Writers conference. Writers cross legs on panels, describe fictitious daily routines. Writers tell packed rooms their parents are disappointed in them. Writers pose for jacket photos, put fist to chin. Writers regret the choice to have bangs at high point of career.

Writers grow out bangs. Writers renounce metaphors. Writers splice commas, defy grammarians. Writers start too many lines with the word “Writers.” Is this working, writers wonder? Is anything? Should writers jump in front of freight trains, get PhDs, offer freelance editorial services?

People bury writers, say they wish writers had written more.