If You're A Writer, You're Probably A Bit Weird*

*But that's okay.

If you were to ask someone what they wanted to do with their life, and they told you "I want to put all the little people that exist inside my head through all kinds of intolerable hell just to see what happens, and then I want to tell as many people in the real world as possible all about it"... you'd probably back away slowly while wondering where to obtain the phone number of the nearest psychiatric institution.

But those of us in The Club know that this isn't a sign of mental illness - or at least, no-one's proved it is. (Yet.) It's just the Call of the Writer. To the non-writers of the world, however, this doesn't sound like the healthiest or most productive way to get life done, which is why they offer the subtle but customary eye-roll and suppressed snigger/groan whenever the dirty little secret is revealed. Add to this that many writers are introspective observers rather than table-dancing tequila-slammers at the party that is life, and it's easy to see how the equation 'writer = a bit odd' evolved.

I quite liked being on my own as a kid. I had friends that I played with of course, but on those occasions where they were elsewhere for whatever reason, the prospect of having 'no-one to play with' didn't faze me at all. In fact, the concept didn't really exist; I had 'friends' in my head that I could play with in the absence of real-world ones. Some grown-ups - and kids too - found this a bit weird. Some of my friends also found the way I played make-believe games a bit weird. Most of us have had favourite tv programmes that we 'played' as our own make-believe games. But while all my friends would pick existing characters from the show to 'be,' I preferred to invent a completely new one. This didn't always go down well with friends who were particular about Realism in Their Fantasy Games:

FRIEND: I've never heard of that character before. She's not in that show!
ME: I know. I made her up.
FRIEND: What? You can't do that! You can't just make characters up!
ME: Why not?
FRIEND: Well - because then she could just be anything! She could just be and do anything you wanted her to!

Well, duh!

But apparently, this sort of extreme roleplaying had the potential to Ruin The Game, so I did my best to temper my maverick tendencies in those situations. It wasn't that I had this megalomaniac urge to be a Mary Sue on Steroids - the characters I invented myself had just as many flaws and limitations as the pre-existing ones. I just wanted to take our make-believe games in new directions - create new adventures and scenarios, rather than just re-enact the episodes we'd seen on the telly. But I also didn't want to annoy my friends.

Not all of them felt this way, I have to say. Others were more than happy to jump on the creative train and swing it the heck off the designated track. But the ones who preferred to ground their fantasy in the undisputed reality of its TV series origins tended to be Leaders, Type-A personalities, They were assertive, persuasive and probably destined to be Managing Directors when they grew up. Everyone listened to them because they sounded like they knew what they were talking about. Heck, even I listened to them. After all, what did I know? I wasn't Managing Director material. I was too weird.

As an adult I had a string of office jobs - and never seemed to fit in with any of them. I was that tiresome, awkward one who would try and do the job a little bit differently, rather than doing it 'the way it's always been done' - "Wendy, I appreciate you feel a cartoon drawing of you as a skeleton waiting for a phone call from IT Support is a more succinct way of saying you waited for seven hours for them to fix your computer yesterday - but I'm afraid it's not standard company procedure for documenting progress in your Project Log Book." (Nobody ever looked at those things. Nobody. Until that one day I did that cartoon...)

You can only be the Anakin Skywalker of the office environment for so long before it starts to get you down. I was only 'let go' from a job once (and that was mostly due to my thinking that working on a telephone helpdesk was a savvy career move when you're hearing-impaired - you live and learn...) but I've ended up quitting every other office job I had because... well, to be honest, I couldn't believe they hadn't fired me already. I just seemed to be rocking the boat all the time, with my rebellious ideas and opinions and stuff. And yet my bosses were always surprised when I handed in my notice - as if the idea of not having me around anymore hadn't even crossed their minds. Maybe they secretly enjoyed getting exasperated at my efforts to do things differently - as if I was a variation of Christian Grey, but not so much with a Red Room of Pain as a Stationery Cupboard of Crankiness...

So I learned to accept the idea that I was A Bit Weird. That, even if they sort of liked me, Normal People were always going to think there was something a bit wrong with me upstairs, and any attempts I made to fake Normalness were destined to fail at least fifty percent of the time. Obviously I didn't like feeling like a social misfit, but I realised the only way to not get terminally depressed about it was to just admit that I had the problem and try to minimise the fallout when it occurred.

I never associated any of it with being a creative person though - until I started spending a lot more time among other creative people. I didn't feel like the Nutter on The Bus in their company; in fact, it felt more like I'd jumped on board the Busful of Fellow Nutters (no disrespect intended, guys.) They knew what it was like to feel 'all social-ed out' at the end of a day, only to realise the 'people' you'd spent the most time with during that day... were the imaginary ones in your current w-i-p. They understood that sometimes that statement coming out of my mouth was raw and undiluted from my brain, because it flashed along my neural pathways too fast for the oh-my-god-you-can't-say-that filter who knew that, actually no, it didn't sound like a good idea at any time. And they totally got the long-term love affair with all things stationery, and the deep truth that is there is no such thing as 'too many' pens or notebooks...

If you're a writer, maybe some of the things I've talked about have rung bells for you too. Perhaps they've got you into trouble on occasions - or at least earned you the odd funny look or two. Maybe you too have been forced to accept the idea that non-writer friends and family think you're a teeny bit strange. It's okay. Being somewhere to the left of Normal is nothing to be ashamed or embarrassed about. Without us, the world would be one giant Stepford Wives metropolis. And there would definitely be a lot less books to read.

What first clued you in to realising that you, as a writer, thought differently from non-writers? I'd love to know. Let all of us writers gather together - whether in real life or via cyberspace - and embrace our special kind of weirdness!

Born to be A Misfit-Flavoured Writer.

I've heard it said that many writers have felt like the oddball at some point in their life - like they were paddling through the river of life in the opposite direction to everyone else. I am reasonably sure I was born feeling like I didn't quite fit in with the rest of the world. I felt that way throughout childhood, adolescence and  the fun, crazy part of adulthood. And I still feel that way now.

I don't mean in a self-absorbed, hand-wringing 'no-one really understands me!' way. I mean more in the sense of  'Hmmm, I appear to be really rubbish at behaving like other, normal humans' kind of way. It never seemed to spoil my social life - I've had as many friends as other, non-weird people, although I suspect I was probably labelled My Weird Friend by more than a few - and I didn't attract nearly as many bullies as some poor sods with far less potential for ridicule than I possessed. But nonetheless I've always had this feeling of being a kind of imposter in this world; an alien who got accidentally dumped on the wrong planet and has since spent her whole life navigating and minimising the fallout from her cocked-up attempts to blend in with the natives.

It has its advantages, of course. This world will never cease to amaze, horrify, delight, shock, depress, inspire and frustrate me - and the day it does is the day I will know it's because I'm actually dead. It also means I feel no pressure whatsoever to conform to anybody's ideas of how I should look or dress or what I should aspire to; I've got so used to effortlessly failing at all those things for so much of my life already that I dropped out of that competition years ago. And this in itself has the added bonus of making my life far less complicated; I don't have to keep remembering what and who I'm 'supposed' to like and not like according to which particular friend or social group I'm talking to. Even if I just agreed with everyone all the time I'd still cock it up anyway, so I may as well just say what I really think and cock it up honestly.

In terms of what I might laughingly call my 'career prospects,' however.... mmm, yeah, that didn't work out so good. I've had a plethora of jobs over my adult life, and the one that lasted the longest was a rather pitiful four years. I've only been fired from two of them, and that was due to being spectacularly rubbish at those jobs rather than any disciplinary reasons - but even in many of the ones I quit, I'm pretty certain I was a bit of a nightmare employee while I was there. This is because they were office jobs; Dilbert In His Cubicle positions, if you like. The kind of jobs where there was A Method for doing every little thing that job entailed; a Method that had been used for years, by every other person who'd ever done that job, because it was A Method That Worked and was therefore How It Must Be Done At All Times.

Putting a little secret-alien-in-residence like me into any job like that is, inevitably, a conflict waiting to happen. In every one of those types of jobs, I quickly established a reputation for myself as the corporate equivalent of the annoying little kid who constantly asks "But why..?" My colleagues just found it funny that I got so bemused and frustrated by all these Methods and Procedures, while managers' reactions ranged from mild annoyance to suspicious unease, as if they were afraid I was some kind of one-woman revolutionist with a secret agenda to Take Down The Company From Within. I tried to knuckle down and play by the rules - no matter how stupid and archaic I thought some of them were - but even when I did, I still cocked things up for myself.

For example, each time I had my annual Employee Review with my line manager, I'm sure I probably did know, on some basic level, that the correct response to the question "So, have you considered opportunities for advancing your role within this company?" was not to burst out laughing and say "What, seriously?" I'm sure I also knew, if I was honest with myself, that when I was advised to record my progress with the technical tasks of my job in a personal work journal, they probably didn't mean for it to take the form of satirical cartoons and poems. All I can say in my defence was 'it felt like the right thing to do at the time.' Which pretty much proves how utterly unsuitable I was - and probably still am - for office jobs.

Eventually I would reach the inevitable point where I just thought "I can't do this anymore and still retain my sanity." My bosses always seemed genuinely surprised when I handed in my notice, as if it was the last thing they were expecting me to do - but I'm pretty sure they must have breathed huge sighs of relief in private. At least I was finally solving their 'Oh god, what the hell do we do with this one?' conundrum.

Through it all, I always had my writing. In fact, you could argue that my writing - and the kind of mindset that comes in particular with writing fiction - was the one thing I could never entirely separate from my hamster-wheel office job existence, and that was part of my repeated downfall in that field. And now I'm a completely-unemployable-in-the-current-recession mum of a primary-school child, I can finally devote my brain and my heart to my writing without feeling that it's What Makes Me A Misfit Person in this world. Well, okay - maybe it is, ultimately, but at least I'm not giving any middle-managers headaches about it anymore.

But at the same time, I've heard of many, many other writers who've happily held down office jobs while pursuing their writing dreams. They have been able to completely separate the office worker part of themselves from the writer part as effectively as building a partition screen between them, that they can open up and close off as and when it suits them. All of which suggests that being crap at office jobs is clearly not an intrinsic part of the writer make-up - and so the added ingredient must be the misfit part. There must be a subsection of Misfit Writers within the club as a whole, right?

There's hope for them, isn't there? There's a place in this world for Misfit Writers? I mean, I know we can be a bit weird sometimes, and there's always going to be this thing where you'll never feel like you really, truly know us completely - but we're okay people underneath it all, and at least you know if we like you we really do like you, for real ('cause if we didn't, we'd be far more likely to tell you than most other people...)

Maybe there should be some sort of Misfit Writers' Society? Maybe there already is...