You know you're a writer when....

please, add your own....


mine:

You're in an interview and the man you are speaking with is talking so fast, digressing so much, falling off the tracks a bit, getting back on, de-railing completely, reversing, starting from point A again, making his point *maybe* somewhere in paragraph five, that by the time you get to the last hour of the interview, you can picture the punctuation in your head and you're trying to determine how, if you were to write him as a character, that you would ever be able to punctuate him and not lose your audience in the drivel!

It's true, in my interview today he talked so long and so far off topic and back to topic then forgot his point and had to rethink it so many times that my eyes blurred and I could imagine how many sets of parenthesis, commas, semicolons, colons, and periods, (and don't even get me started on the exclamations!) it would take to properly punctuate a dictation from him.
UGH!
Lucky in the job I won't be required to punctuate anything he says!


Trish - wanted to "red pen" the entire conversation, hand it back to him and ask for a revision draft.

I'm often caught staring at people and I really want to tell them, the reason is because I'm getting the most complete "quick first impression read" on them I can in their present state because I will use that material for a character sometime down the road. I want to tell them they are being categorized into compartments in my brain of intricate personal detail for some amalgamation of many people into a character, later. Unfortunately they would probably file a police report if I said that, so I end up getting hit on or looked at funny or flipped off because they think i'm either being suggestive or rude.
.

dclary said:

... you can stare at any woman intently, and when she asks what you're doing, say "I'm a writer. I study people."

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I think a woman almost hit me once because I was watching her. She slid into a booth at a diner, she recognized the person sitting across the way, obvious attraction between them. She was wearing a skirt. She swooped the skirt to sit, he catches a look of thigh, she flushed red in the face, and sits down, then she messed with her hair, and fiddled with a necklace whose pendant fell below the V-neck of her blouse and all I could think was he wants to see where that pendant falls and what's on it, but he doesn't want her to show him, he wants to find out for himself...I watched and watched...until she caught me...ugh...busted, and I thought she was coming unglued. I totally intruded on a personal moment for them, apparently. And then I wrote them into a short story later.

I made writer's assumptions that it was a "forbidden" sort of attraction and, in the story, carried it all the way to affair and other sorts of fun stuff once I got them there. I could already tell, they had the attraction before they got there, they talked long into the night. Finger-swirls on coffee cup rims, looking up from a down-cast face, moments that they "got each other" and charted it in their brains as the *right path*. All the way until they left when she left first and he watched her all the way until she got to her car and she sat in her car until she saw him pay the bill and stand up.
What a moment! It was worth writing (with all the embellishments a writer can take!) They were a catalyst for a kickass story!

pconsidine said:

You know you're a writer when...


you're sitting in an AA meeting and secretly keeping track of which stories would make the funniest scenes in your work in progress.

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Excellent example! YES!

in college I wrote a letter to the editor of the college paper to tell them how I felt about their ability to spot and correct typos, not to mention their one-sided commentary in "news articles" and went on to one of their columnists and red-penned the entire article and attached it to the letter.
My letter was published and the columnist decided to poke fun at "the anonymous letter to the editor" but still did it with incorrect grammar, and couldn't find a thing in my letter to bash, or I assure you it would have been added.
I was Evil...pure evil.
The advisor for the paper asked me to come and write for them after that.