Customer: Can I eat it?

Writer: No.

Customer: Can I wear it?

Writer: No

Customer: Okay Bye.

Being a writer is seriously one of the stupidest things a person could try and do. If you are one of those miserably afflicted by Remington dreaming, it’s time to take up something else, anything will do…   go now swiftly, while there’s still time.. …oh all right read on if you must, and then let it rest, because… and you know this already…

1. Writers have no career prospects.

Getting published is about as easy as rescuing a beached whale with a cheesegrater. While you are waiting to be published your ego will suffer so extensively that by the time you give up on being a writer you will have the professional confidence of a postage stamp licker, and have lost most of your hair. If you persist, you will find that..

2.Writers cannot say they are writers.

It is impossible to actually call yourself a writer and keep a straight face. No matter how you try and say it, a casual aside, purposeful optimism, raw bravado or self-deprecating cool, something will give you away. A twitch of the nose, an eyebrow, a hair flick. You cannot in all seriousness, be taken seriously, when you say you are a writer. You will inevitably cite your day job first and if you don’t have one, invent one.

3. All writers who do say they are writers, are tossers.

If you do somehow manage to get through the introductory sentence, you will then be required to describe what you are writing about. This second stage, is hardly ever traversed, unless you are Salman Rushdie, without sounding like you are in Grade 2 and you’ve just announced you plan to be an astronaut. However earnest your topic may be, you can guarantee the person listening is not actually listening but concentrating on nodding and shifting their gaze in equal parts, so as not to reveal their inner smirk with a nose twitch, eyebrow or hair flick.

4.Writers can’t speak properly.

Writers are constantly shifting their pitch between the affected English lyricist and the street wise, salt of the earth, common folk.So their sentences come out like this:

     Yes I quite agree my dear, One does tend to see things in an awfully

        feckin odd, bloody bizarre way

    when one is out there on the precipice of one’s life staring into

       the bloody great big cosmic nothin’, hey brother.

5. Writers have no friends.

Writers cannot have friends. Any friends they have are fodder for absurdist theatre, in which case they are no longer friends. Friends who are not satirised, feature in tragi-drama, and are equally deeply offended. Any friends that are left after that, are getting ready to leg it as they are tired of you never having any money to pay for lunch.

6. Writers are Thieves.

There are now so many thoughts in the world, that Writers have to constantly google their original thoughts to make sure someone else didn’t say it first. Which they inevitably did. So writers feel disproportionately guilty, false . Indeed, the range of new thoughts available are now so few, it makes a writer feel …. like butter scraped over too much bread, when one would rather feel sort of …unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life.

7. Writing poses a serious health risk.

When I was a young adult I discovered my favourite writer Richard Brautigan, had committed suicide.  Wha? Ba…? How?

RB was the coolest cleverest, funniest ,most unique Remington wielding individual on the planet.  How could he leave like this?

I soon discovered most writers commit suicide at some point in their lives.

8. Writing cannot be eaten or worn.

If you have tried, like me, to sell your wares at the local market, you will discover the true idiocy of this pursuit.

Customer : Can I eat it?

Writer: No

Customer: Can I wear it?

Writer: No.

Customer: Ok Bye.

9. Writers are terrible at maths.

10.   Writers cannot be happy.

If writers were happy, stories would go like this;

Once upon a time, they all lived happily ever after.

The End.

To all you writers who venture on…I take my hat off to you. And yes I am wearing a beret. ..What?…