There’s an idea floating around out in the sphere of writing-blogs. People seem somewhat annoyed by the notion that “anyone” could be a writer. It’s a serious profession, they claim, and it should be left to the professionals.
While they are right about it being a serious profession, the idea of just leaving it to the professionals who are officially sanctioned feels wrong. There are two pieces in particular that I came across while perusing the “Freshly Pressed” page at wordpress.com, and to which I replied hastily and, probably, inelegantly. I’ll try to do a bit better here.
The first is this article on the difference between being a professional and being a hobbyist. If she were to just leave it as “here’s when you can call yourself a professional” I’d probably not have even taken note, but she seems to exalt the professional title beyond what its worth. She meets a man who claims to be a photographer. After some interrogation, she learns that he is “actually” a bartender, and in the article sort of shames him for “pretending”, without ever really getting to know his art. Now if he lied and said he was a successful professional, that’s a different issue – but it doesn’t seem to be the issue at hand.
There are times when professional credentials are hugely important – medicine, teaching, mechanics, etc. In these areas, the general populace doesn’t have the ability and knowledge to check the work of the purveyor, and in those cases, past history is rather helpful. For example, I wouldn’t be able to determine which doctor was best by simply checking their work – it would be complicated and require that I learn a significant amount of science. In that case, I’m glad for credentials.
With art, however, success is measured by both critical acclaim and popular opinion. Artists can be a one-hit-wonders, industry credentials be damned. Beyond this, you can be a bad artist and still BE an artist. Lots of bad artists and writers are paid prodigiously for their work, while many incredibly talented people are overlooked.
And to be fair – there are also loads of terrible accountants, mechanics, and dentists who are perfectly well credentialed.
More to the point, can’t you still identify with your art even if you’re not a successful professional? The author’s definition (which she borrows from another blogger) of who can claim to be a writer is someone who has commercially accepted, published work with a great sales record. By this definition, Kafka was merely a hobbyist – a lawyer, primarily, who sometimes wrote. Is that really what we want to say?
A lot of the time, owning your art is what makes you successful. I went through a phase in college where I told people I was a painter. And I sold a painting. Claiming your art as your identity is like giving yourself permission to be the person you want to be, and to do the things you want to do, regardless of whether you have external validation.
In this second article, the author says no to NaNoWriMo, and compares trying to write a novel in a month with trying to compose a symphony in a month, or choreograph a ballet in a month. She’s worried that people might some how be harmed by this attempt – it’ll take them away from their true art, or it’ll discourage them when they realize that novel writing is something to be left to those with the refinement of a lifelong practitioner.
It’s a comparison designed to hold the novelist up as a highly trained specialist. But novels come in so many forms that even among the great and well-known novels, such specialization is not reducible to something as specific as choreographing a ballet. It’s closer to trying to choreograph some dance, of any degree of difficulty, and any degree of quality. Just like someone choreographed Swan Lake, someone choreographed the hokey-pokey, too. Some novels are Slaughterhouse Five, and some are just fun stories which can speak to people without incredible nuance.
And even if you don’t have the training to be great, your work still has value. I organize dance workshops where we invite literally anyone off the street to come in and learn how to dance. There’s a huge annual event called National Dance Day, where everyone is invited to try and learn a choreographed dance and take lessons. Just dive in and try it, because even if they’re not ever going to be a professional dancers, it is still great fun.
Trying to write a novel is closer to that. Sure, if you get up off the couch with no training and launch your self into a split-leap, you’ll hurt yourself, but does that mean you should shy away from Zumba? If I attempted to write an astro-physics textbook, I might strain something, but attempting to write a quiet ode to my childhood? I think I can handle that without getting hurt. Signing up for NaNoWriMo was actually an incredible way to give myself permission to make my passion my priority – even if I’m not a professional.
NaNoWriMo and National Dance Day aren’t the only programs out there asking people to join in a task that seems impossible. Eric Whitacre’s Virtual Choir invites people to record themselves singing a vocal part and upload to a website where his team will merge the files together to create a full choral sound. It’s a beautiful, wonderful thing. There are also a number of citizen science initiatives out there that ask people to do what would otherwise be outside of the realm of possibility. Kaggle competitions let people with passion prove themselves with the quality of their work. NASA’s citizen science program lets people join in the fun of data collecting. You can do science without being a professional scientist.
No one is pretending these initiatives will make you into a professional. For that, you’ll need training, practice, and talent. But there’s still value there. While there are some good criticisms of NaNoWriMo out there (like this one by Michael Allen Leonard from Public Domain), generally speaking, I can’t really see what harm there is in encouraging people to challenge themselves. The worst that can happen is that they stop trying, and then the naysayers get what they wanted in the first place – fewer people “pretending” to be writers.
Write because you love it (and click that link, because Christian Mihai is worth it), and you are a writer. It comes from you.
Most likely, the novel I write this month will be terrible and no one will ever read it. I’m ok with that. I do a lot of things at which I will never be great simply because I love doing them. So if I’m out, and someone wants to know who I am, I might just say that I’m a writer, a painter, and a Lindy Hopper, even though I am a professional at none of these things.
And yes, I’ll say I’m a lowly adjunct philosophy professor too. I’ve got all the credentials I need for that.
Related articles
- NaNoWriMo isn’t bad. You are. (chazzwrites.com)
- 10 Top Reasons People Use To Avoid Choral Singing (singingoutloudblog.wordpress.com)
- Naysayers, be gone!! (jingology.wordpress.com)
Stories & Soliloquies 
13 thoughts on “Professionalism”
suzie81
Thanks for your commentary on my post – I found it interesting, enjoyed reading it and absolutely respect that everyone is entitled to an opinion, but there were a few matters that I’d like to clear up if that’s ok as I felt that I’ve been misrepresented a little.
1. Not that it’s relevant, but I didn’t go on a date with him (no idea where you got that from). He was a school friend-of-a-friend that I met outside a pub and made polite conversation with him, which I actually wrote in the post itself.
2. I asked him ‘What do you do?’ which where I’m from means ‘what is your job?’ I didn’t ask him what his hobbies or passions were, I asked him what his job was. He told me that he was a photographer, which made me think that he earned a living from taking photographs. You stated in your post that ‘Now if he lied and said he was a successful professional, that’s a different issue’ and in my opinion that was what exactly my issue was – he gave the impression that his job was in photography. I’d also like to point out that I was annoyed at him for hiding the fact that he was a barman as I felt that by doing this he was putting the profession down.
3. I borrowed Caitlyn’s quote because this was part of a conversation that I was having with her and it related to the subject content of my post.
I agree with you in that success can be demonstrated in the owning of your art and the issue of success is somthing you’ve inspired me to look at further. However, the subject of the post was about professional status and I still stand by the fact that you should only be allowed to call yourself a professional if you actually earn money from doing the job. Absolutely, I’d agree that some amateurs are better than professionals at things, but the difference between the two is that one earns money from it, the other doesn’t. I love writing, I love photography (I’ve posted many examples on my blog) and I love baking and am reasonable at all three, but part of my post was that I don’t refer to myself as a ‘writer,’ ‘photographer’ or ‘baker’ if somebody asks my profession as I don’t get paid for it. I get paid for teaching, so I tell them I’m a teacher. If somebody asks me what I enjoy doing, then I’m more than happy to ‘wax lyrical’ about all three hobbies.
Michelle Joelle
And likewise thank you so much for responding back again! I love that this is becoming a conversation, it’s the most delightful part of blogging I’ve encountered thus far. To your comments:
Thank you for your correction. I hate when I take information too hastily, so I apologize for that, and have fixed it in my post. I still do stand by my point though that “What do you do?” should not automatically mean “what is it that you are paid for as a vocation?” We ask that question as an icebreaker to find out about a person, to find out who they are. To insist that someone is reducible to their profession is, often, erroneous. Some people view their job as a calling (I do – I love teaching and am glad to be called a teacher), and some just see it as a thing they have to do in order to make their true calling possible (I have had these jobs too). Of course, not all hobbyists are their hobby, but to declare that anyone who does something for which they are not paid is merely a hobbyist is incredibly limiting.
I want to be clear that I’m not saying that people should claim to be professionals when they are not; what I’m saying is that people should be able to say “I am a writer” without having to be a professional. There are more than two categories – professional or hobbyist – and in general, I don’t find such categories useful in the arts. To say that one is a “professional” tells me nothing about whether or not that person’s art will speak to me, or even be good. To call someone a hobbyist is to diminish what that person does, and his or her commitment to that art. Even if the person isn’t terribly good, he or she can still be committed enough for me to grant that they are artist, even if not a professional one. Essentially, I just don’t find the distinction as useful if you aren’t conversing about something industry related.
Again, thank you so much for reading and responding. You’ve given me a lot to think about!
jaymop
I think you already know what I’m going to say. It rhymes with “who’s prancer” and is high time you gave yourself permission for that dance, too 😉
Michelle Joelle
🙂
Nimue Brown
A thoughtful post, with many good points, I’m glad you tagged me just so that I got to read it.
In reality, most creative people do not earn enough to live on (or are ok about being paupers). Judging any artist by what they can sell seems… well, pointless, given that. So many of the greats in so many creative fields were, like Kafka, only recognised after they died (Mozart, Van Gough and more).
You only get publishable authors by having a lot of amateur authors and much of it you can only learn by doing. It used to be the case that there were a lot of magazines as paying markets, where new authors could cut their teeth and break through. Those have mostly gone, leaving a problematic gap. The transition from enthusiast to selling work is in many ways harder than it used to be. Yes, anyone can self publish, but many ebooks and print on demand books do not sell.
Inside the industry, the pressure on authors to turn out at a NaNo style pace, with no advance, is increasing. Your best shot as a self published author is to write like its NaNo all year round. That’s not sustainable, and I’ve watched talented authors burn themselves out trying to get a breakthrough. There are wider cultural issues here, which may not matter to someone who is enjoying the fun of the writing month, but will matter a lot if you decide you want to try and move on from there. Forewarned is forearmed.
Michelle Joelle
Thank you so much for your comment, I’m really glad that we get to speak (write?) more directly. I think it really helped me clarify what you meant by the “wider implications” at which you hinted in some of your responses to comments, which I agree now are more problematic than I’d initially recognized. And I definitely agree that a writerly attitude can’t be confined to one month, even I don’t have ambitions of self-publishing. I’m looking forward to my own person NaNoEdMo (editing) and NaNoReWriMo (rewriting) and so much more.
Again, thank you for coming here to engage further. I’m new to blogging, and it’s so exciting to be able to participate in this conversation.
Nimue Brown
Thank you. I’ve learned during this, as well. I had no sense of the community angle and how important that side is to folks, although at the same time, it flags up for me the woeful lack of community many of us experience in so many aspects of life.
If I had known what was going to happen to the post I’d probably have written something much clearer about the wider industry stuff in the first place the pressures, the burnouts etc, hindsight is a fabulous thing! I’ve been blogging for a while now, it is a strange process, but a fascinating thing to engage in, especially when you get these cross-blog conversations.
jingology
Excellent post! You said what I was trying to say, only much more eloquently. I loved the points you made about writing (and dance…) being an art form. Sometimes art can come as a gift, other times it can be explored by taking classes, but either way it is an expression of self. Thank you for your link to my post, also.
Michelle Joelle
Thank you so much for your sweet comment! I really enjoyed your piece as well. Upon a reread, I think you may have influenced my thought more than I recognized. Thank you for reading. 🙂
the well-traveled wife
very interesting. you really are a great writer!
Michelle Joelle
Thank you for reading, and for the nice comment! And also for the kale-butternut squash recipe up on your blog. Yum!
Nina Kaytel
I love it. Writing is a skill. You can write anything you want, but can you make it worth-wild? To get to the goal of being a published author, you have to put the work into it. It’s not write and BAM professional. It’s write, edit, cry, edit some more, submit to agents, cry, acquire agent, revise, publish and promote. You keep learning along the way.
NaNo is a great exercise to test skill, to have a goal. Some writer’s I talk to never finish that first novel, because it is so open ended. No one reads the first draft thus there is no pressure. NaNo is a goal line.
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