Undefined

Sickness is an allowance. It provides time and space to reconsider choices.

Over the past few days I’ve been thinking about labels: playwright, writer, reviewer, critic, whatever, blah, blah.

I thought about how I’ve tried to fit into a hole: “Oh, I’ll be (fill in the blank.)” or “(Fill in the blank) is what I’m doing now.”

I don’t know how I became preoccupied with providing descriptions of who I am. Perhaps it was the slug line exercise: Create a sound byte describing yourself as a writer.

I wonder who benefits from these descriptions. Marketing people? Agents? Because boxes don’t benefit creators.

Rather than letting the work define itself, those descriptions define and limit people.

It's time to dump all that. I will no longer tell people that I’m (fill in the type of writer).

Maybe who I am hasn’t been invented yet.

Comments

[Patrick]

Well put, Laura. I struggle with this constantly. I felt like I made a strong move away from playwriting into fiction, but now I'm doing a bit of both. Who or what am I?

I think in our culture, especially the middle-class, hyper-educated part of our culture, we're so often defined by profession and our specific jobs. It's hard enough to be a writer, and hard to know when you can actually start calling yourself a writer, especially if you don't actually "earn your living" from your writing. Though, if that was the bar, there would be almost no playwrights in America, and very few fiction writers, too. This also makes it really tough if you're in a dry patch, or an experimental patch, or are about to quit a project and go onto something entirely different, just because it's time.