Not a writer

Thursday 11/20/25

I used to see--because I'd take a gander, and then I never had to again--people I had dated who describe themselves as a writer in their social media bio and on LinkedIn, which is hilarious, and a lie, because none on them wrote or write any more than your cat does.

It's just this thing people say about themselves in their brokenness to the extent that nearly everyone, it seems, says it, and have no compunction or reservation or shame in doing so (well, unless it's someone I knew and they knew I'd seen that, then they would be embarrassed and ashamed; but to the other frauds; nah, it's all good). These people did not write, do not write, have never written what one would call any kind of a work, have ever published anything--what a laugh--or made any attempt to write.

One was an alcoholic from a rich family who "dated" a district attorney in his sixties (classy) who was more than thirty years her senior whose kids she was younger than who took topless photos of her in the woods which she slapped up on Instagram. "Writer" in the bio. I laughed when I saw that. Writer. It's like me just casually saying I'm an astronaut.

"Where can I read your work, writer?"

"Oh, I don't have any."

"Cool."

People are insane. And everything they put forward about themselves--in an official capacity--is a lie. They have no real identity. Writing--and "writer"--is the easiest thing to do this with. There need be no proof. It's like pinning a self-selected merit badge for attention to your chest. You can't fake being a basketball player, right? A pianist? But writer?

That's one reason why you have millions--and it's many millions--of people who call themselves writers, very few of whom even read or have ever read. You need no proof, you need no ability, you need not write. But you're special! Look at you! Special, special, special! You got a thing!

Here's an example of one of those bio's of which I speak. Random person. This is usually the first thing I see when I go on any social media, and that's why I click right back out inside of five seconds.

Writer. Seeker. Alchemist. Mystic. Sufi.Radically re-imagining psychospiritual paradigms.

Ha.

How do you take anyone seriously in our world? It's just lies and mental illness. Delusions. Weakness. Lack of depth, substance, sincerity. That person had a linktree--or however it's spelled--link in the bio, and I clicked it. Email her for collabs! is what it said.

Hi. Any person who use the word "collabs" is emotionally, mentally, intellectually, and spiritually incapable of being a writer.

If you're one of these millions of people, and you write some horrible, unreadable, lacking in basic literacy fantasy story--which is what many of these people think of as the only thing that writing is in their tiny brains--what's it in you own self-serving best interest to extol?

That writing is subjective! There is no good writing! There is no bad! It's what someone feels about it!

Right? Because if that's true--I mean, 100%--then whatever you piss out on the page can totes be the best thing ever written. To someone, right? Hooray! And it can't be bad, because that's just opinion! Bullet proof!

Bullet proof delusion and mental illness. Pathetic desperation.

Writing something great is the hardest thing in the world to do. There are infinite variables. There aren't infinite variables with being an NBA player. There are only so many moves, shots, passes--types, I mean--that exist. The court has these measurements. You are within this size range. Etc.

But no one would say that basketball ability is subjective. We can see that player X is better than player Y. It's not subjective that LeBron James is better than Bronny James.

So why do we do it with writing? There are potentially no limits in writing like there are in basketball. Think of how hard it is just to be clear. But to write something on hundreds of different levels simultaneously, that pulls back the veil on the mysteries of existence, of humanity, on why we are here, that is accessible, can be felt in the back of the neck even when it can't be expressed from out of the mouth of the reader, that works for different kinds of people from different backgrounds, with different levels of intelligence, on their particular level, to the full extent, all at once? With something that has never been created before? That is unlike anything else? That isn't bullshit, let's-just-throw-out-the-descriptor unique but actually unique. In the history of humans.

You need to be born with genius, and you need to work every single second of your life--without taking a single second off--in mastering that genius, expanding it, to begin to get close to creating something like this.

But you think that's subjective? And there's no way to measure ability and quality? Really? You can gauge ability with butter churners, such that we can say, he's better at churning butter than she is, but you can't do it with writing?

You can't see the flaw in that logic? What can you see then? Anything? Can you see how many fingers you have? No? It's blurry? You can't see the ruse here? You can't see why imposters with no talent want and need this to be true in order to keep stringing themselves along with a passel of lies, while getting others to do the same, so they can avoid the truth and make others complicit in them for this, too, such that it can be forced into being a kind of truth?

There's isn't a bigger lie. Again, this is what we were talking about yesterday with inversion. Think about the irony, too. Writing is so important, I'm a writer, look at me...but it's not possible to be either good or bad at it. It's a non-entity. It's not possible to be good or bad at having the sun rise in the morning. So, yeah, that's just like writing. I'm a writer, though. Might as well say I'm a sun-riser!

By this definition--the "rules" and regulations of these people--the one isn't more valid than the other.

Again, it's just delusion, mental illness, and willful ignorance that eventually becomes a person's norm, the only way they can think and be, which in turn becomes society's norm, because this is how everyone came to think and what they became. You have a world as echo chamber where no one deals in truth and truth kills people who have made themselves into barely sentient life forms that can't handle what become the death blows of truth.

Everything is a muscle. Dealing with truth is a muscle. Facing truth is a muscle. The less you use that muscle, the more it turns to flab, so that when you are forced to use it, your body breaks down in this metaphor. You're not in the proper training. You don't have the fitness. Your legs give out, your heart explodes. Instead: Babble, babble, babble. Reinforce nothingness with the spackling paste of nothingness.

Most people in life--and all of these people--would be better served with the thing that they hate the most, fear the most, and seek to avoid the most: The truth. Before it gets too late, which to paraphrase Yogi Berra, comes early enough. Someone saying, "Look, you are not good at this, you don't just decide to say you are something and you're it, no one wants this, there are twenty million people doing exactly what you're doing, there's no market for it, you're not thinking about readers at all, you don't care about readers and reading, it's not what anyone wants. Do something else."

But that's why you have writing communities: For the purpose of the opposite of the truth being said, and feeding the delusions and mental illness and "rewarding" the pathetic desperation with likes, heart emojis, and full-on massive fucking lies, so that the person doing the lying can themselves get all of the "benefits" of the writing community.

No real writer would be a part of any writing community. They wouldn't have writer friends because these people are fake, full of shit, and almost always insincere--not to mention wholly without talent or anything to add to your life with their work or their personage. You think Keats right now would be in some writing subreddit? Do you really believe that?

None of it is real, none of it is really about writing. It's just that writing is the easiest thing to fake within this context and the context of our soulless, empty, idiotic, unthinking, ugly, illiterate world. Post something on Substack and you can call yourself a published author. Having said what I've said, it's not like this fantasy shit is any worse than The New Yorker garbage. Not really. What's the difference? The New Yorker shit will properly use "is" instead of "are." Really. That's about it. Grammar. Spelling.

I've given this analogy before, but you can also think of the difference in sports radio terms. Turn on sports radio, and you will hear a moron of a host. A guy who can barely speak. Who says "you know" every four words, does the toilet rhetoric every other line--"He flicked his shmenzer and threw it forty yards," "They crapped the bed," "He's a pants crapper," etc.--and you think, My God, no one could be worse at this than this guy. In the analogy, that's fiction in Granta, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, etc.

But then Davie from Southie calls and it's like, Wow, wow, wow, this person can't even come close to formulating a sentence, and it sounds like he has a meatball sub in his mouth as he's mangling the English language, if this is even English, between chews and gasps of breath because he just stood up for the first time in seven hours and he's so fat that the three strides has him winded and you're wondering if that's the sound of a human or a busted accordion leaking marinara?

And you try to imagine the show if this guy were the host. In this analogy, he's that self-professed writer, one of the many millions. He couldn't even do what the real host does. Wouldn't be able to read the advertising copy before the commercial. Wouldn't be able to say, "Welcome back..." after the commercials were done.

And that's how I think about these millions of writers who aren't writers and the writers who are terrible at writing who have fiction in The New Yorker.

How low is that bar, huh?

And you know why none of these millions are calling out that so-called best writing that we all know sucks if we actually look at it? Because no one is fucking looking at it seriously. These millions of self-professed writers don't read anything. They're not sincere. Writing and reading doesn't mean anything to them. It's just the easiest thing, the closet thing to hand, that they could use to try and pretend they have a thing that makes them special. That's the sole motivation. When they post some comically bad thing they've written and ask "Would you keep reading?" they aren't interested in a reader's experience. They want approbation.

A real writer thinks first, last, and everywhere in between about the reader. The reader, the reader, the reader. The reader's experience. The reader's life. The reader's mind, heart, soul. The reader is absolute and unconditional for the real writer. The reader is not a means to an end. Yes, if you are the best writer ever you want to be compensated to a level proportionate with that. But I'm talking about in the making of the work. You want the reader to read because of what that does for the reader. Full stop, as they say.

Whereas, with these people, if one of their number lies and says, "I would totally keep reading!" as pertains this illiterate slop that you can't even understand a sentence of, that's a them thing, a pathetic attempt to fill the abyss of nothingness in them thing, not a for the reader thing. It masquerades as 2-D version of the latter which any non-moron should know right away, but non-morons are very few and far between, and virtually non-existent in these circles and subculture.

But we know with a place like The New Yorker and their fiction, that that's not a writing bar, it's not a quality bar, it's not a bar that has anything to do with something being a story that anyone would want to read, would enjoy reading, would profit in whatever way from reading, should read, or does read without an agenda, a main one being, "Look at me! I read a story in The New Yorker! Don't you think I'm smart? This means I'm smart! Look at my tote bag!!!!!"

Which constitutes its own set of lies and desperate projection and indication of ablating self-doubt and brokenness.