An Arrogant Writers’ Moment I Really Hope to Never Duplicate

I realize I haven’t been particularly nice to my fellow writers these last few weeks.

I blame them completely for this bit of unpleasantness. If they would stop being so obnoxious, I would stop complaining about them. Yet they keep giving me reason to gripe.

Maybe that’s because, collectively speaking, we writers take ourselves way too seriously.

I’ll be the first person to say that authoring a book is awesome. It’s creating life, after all!

But like mad scientists, we too often get arrogant about that wondrous ability. Which makes for downright embarrassing results when people realize we’re not nearly as amazing as we think we are.

I recently ran into an example of this at a local Barnes & Noble, where I was greeted by a well-dressed man with a salesman’s smile and a premeditated opening line of, “Hi. I’m an author.”

His words and tone indicated his opinion that I should automatically be impressed by this fact.

Not trying to be a jerk here, but anyone can write anything and get published these days, either through self-publishing (Ta-da! Jeannette DiLouie) or connections. So he might as well have said “Hi. I’m a Bob Evans’ employee” or “Hi. I work at the Pennsylvania Renaissance Faire.”

I’ve gotten paychecks from both places. There’s little to no talent necessary.

Now, I have no direct idea whether this particular author’s novel was worthwhile or not. I didn’t buy it and don’t plan to. All I know is what I heard from him and then read online on Amazon, where I found four reviews.

Considering the glowing terminology in three of them, I have to assume they were from friends and family. But the fourth can be summed up as “meh.” Though the reviewer gave the story three stars, he called the plot and characters unoriginal, basically defining the latter as “stereotypical” and the former as “predictable.”

Hardly a reason to get a big head, right? Yet even if he was the next Charles Dickens or Mary Shelley or Harriet Beecher Stowe (historical authors I greatly respect. And I don’t respect many), he still wouldn’t have any reason to walk around with his nose in the air.

There’s no excuse to be so full of yourself. Ever.

On the plus side, I now know how I’m going to greet people at my very first book signing, coming up at Ukazoo Books in Towson on Saturday, October 3 (1:00-3:00 pm)…

Pretty much anyway but “Hi. I’m an author.”