23 August, 2007

Writers, Writers Everywhere

The Guardian reports:

More Britons dream about becoming an author than any other job, according to a new survey.

A YouGov poll has found that almost 10% of Britons aspire to being an author, followed by sports personality, pilot, astronaut and event organiser on the list of most coveted jobs.

I wouldn’t be surprised if something similar was true of English-speaking people in the cities of India. I have wanted to be a writer since I was three years old; but for a decade, so has almost every Indian that I run into. Ever since Arundhati Roy got her advance and her Booker, every Joe on the street wants to be a writer. I could be biased, because I’ve worked in ‘creative’ professions such as advertising, television and journalism, where such ambitions are likely to abound, but every second person I meet says he or she wants to write a book. Most of them don’t actually read much, and their prolificness is often inversely proportional to the quality of their work. They are generally more in love with the idea of being a writer than with the act of writing.

As much as I am embarrassed to tell people that I want to be an author because it has become such a clichéd ambition, I am also shamed by the fact that most of my close friends are genuinely talented writers, who work with far more rigor and discipline than I have been able to muster so far. (You know who you are, and I won’t embarrass you with links.) They inspire me, much as the hordes of wannabes outside repel me. So maybe, one of these days, I should stop doing useless things like blogging and get down to some serious work.

(Link via Marginal Revolution.)