~~~Lara Zielin~~~

Has anyone been noticing the proliferation of dorks on TV lately? It’s awesome. There’s Ugly Betty, Dwight Schrute from the Office, even Gaius Baltar from Battlestar Galactica.

What’s great about seeing so many dorks is that it humanizes the dork experience, which, if you’re anything like me, you’re scarily familiar with. Nicknames, weight issues, bad clothes – the list goes on. I have fewer dork experiences now that I have fake hair and my new BFF Mac makeup by my side, but they still happen. And the worst ones, the most damaging ones, are the ones where you encounter someone who just doesn’t think you amount to squat, even though you know you have a glittery lion on the inside of you waiting to bedazzle the world.

My recent dork experience made me realize that, at the end of the day, you have to teach other people how to treat you (as Rob says), and yet there are some battles you just can’t win. And this is where having a little card in your back pocket that reads “writer” becomes such a powerful thing. There are myriad ways we all identify ourselves and find meaning in our lives, and sometimes we forget that writing is one of the most powerful.

How dare someone treat you with anything less than total respect when you put pen to paper and spin stories that make people happy? It’s unthinkable that someone would act like a know-it-all around you, when you’ve done the hard work of digging through the slop of the soul to find the one pearl that will make a story sing.

Now, of course, crap still happens. People are … people. And not everyone is going to understand how to treat you because maybe they’re born jerk-faces, and obviously they can’t see all the fabulous manuscripts and poems and works you’ve started, or finished, or just need to find the right agent for.

But don’t wait for a $500,000 book deal to consider yourself a writing success and worthy of respect by either the writing community or the people around you. I’m not advocating being an asshole or anything – I’m just saying, keep that writer card in your back pocket and pull it out regularly. It’s a badge of honor.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 20th, 2007 at 4:03 pm and is filed under writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.