May 18, 2006
I don't know the actual quote or even the source, although I think the source was Samuel Johnson, and I'm not even entirely sure what he was referring to specifically, but it's a nice catch-all:

Good writers are like dancing dogs and female preachers. It's not that we're surprised to see it done well. We're surprised to see it done at all.

Something like that.

My 12-year-old son writes stories. He plays bassoon and guitar. He actually sits down on his own and scribbles out his stories, and many of them are multi-part fantasy sagas that seem to reside more in his head than on the page. He says he wants to be a writer when he grows up, or a movie director, or now he's saying part-time writer/part-time composer.

He's taken to writing out little pieces of music for the bassoon. I've been a little surprised that there seems to be a theme in his songs, although they tend to degenerate a bit to where the theme disappears. Still, he's getting something from the process and I think that's a good thing.

My wife and I suspect this is not typical 12-year-old behavior. Ian's no prodigy, but we can see where his interests lie. Something to be nurtured, I think, rather than to tell him, "Yeah, but you can't make a living that way, you should major in computers or engineering so you can get a job," like my parents did. Kind of backfired over the years, I think.

I remember in high school, I was waffling a bit, thinking of majoring in music. My parents, my Mom especially, would have freaked out, and she was really pushing something practical. For career "day" I visited the V.A. Hospital's med tech labs and later the labs at the Lapeer Hospital. I remember vividly a technologist at the VA saying to me, "Yeah? You're into music? We've got a tech here who plays sax on the weekends."

There's nothing wrong with doing what you love on the side. I'm eminently practical. I just wonder why we're so set on creating fallback positions so early. It may be that as we grow older we realize that many DO fail and it's probably better to make good money and have health insurance and benefits at a job we hate than to be unable to make a decent living--it beats living on the street, certainly, and there are worse ways of going through life.

I just wonder about the value of expecting failure and planning for it.

That isn't to say, in this context, you should quit your job and say, "I'm a writer now."

People do that, and successfully, and at some point in time you will have to make a leap of faith of one sort or another. And not everyone is cut out to make a living in the arts, because it's a different playing field than your usual 9 to 5 job. You have to become accustomed to uncertainty and lack of security and have confidence that there's more work right around the corner and enough of it to keep you in green tea and Hostess Cupcakes.

As Mr. Johnson may have said, "It's not that we expect to see it done well. We're surprised to see it done at all."

Best,
Mark Terry