In the Beginning Was the Word
Have you heard the joke about the Hollywood starlet who was so dumb she slept with the writer?
Another favourite of mine is the joke about the writer who died and was offered the option of going to Heaven or to Hell. So he went to Hell, escorted by St Peter, and was shown a room full of writers chained to desks, being beaten and whipped and abused by demons. He didn’t fancy that, so he went to Heaven and was shown a room full of writers in chains, being beaten and whipped and abused etc. The writer, baffled, asked what actually was the difference between the two places? And St Peter said, “In Heaven, the writers all have book deals.”
I love writer jokes because they’re all true; writers are crazy people who only write because they have to.
In the course of my career I’ve met a lot of writers. Almost all of them nice, a couple not so nice. I’ve worked with theatre writers and movie writers, including one Oscar winner (“The British are coming!”), and as a writer myself I’ve written prime time TV cop shows, thrillers, movies (2, as co-writer), and a pretty wide variety of radio plays, as well as writing SF for those nice people in Orbit. [NB the software on this site is programmed to automatically amend the words ‘my bloody publishers’ to ‘those nice people at Orbit’ – clever, huh?]
Writers, you’ll be interested to hear, are all the same, no matter what medium they write for. We’re all, in other words, wonderful, warm-hearted, generous, and totally obsessed with the ideas in our own brains. We’re also inclined to carp; Kieran Prendeville once told me that the apposite collective noun is a ‘whinge’ of writers. (more…)