The Cynical Career Counsellor Explains Your Future as a

Writer

Oh—you’re the kid who won that story contest a while back. Yeah, I guess I could tell you about being a writer if you want a good hobby for when… what? You want to make a living at it? Okay, then that’s different…

You’ll head off to college after high school and do the general first year or two in the Arts faculty, and then when you get a chance you’ll apply to the writing coop or English honors program. Either way, you'll have to show some college writing teachers what you’ve got to offer. Don’t be surprised if they’re not gushing over anything you do. You see, most writing instructors are simply frustrated writers—if they had their preference, they’d be writing too, but they can’t make a living at it so they toil in academia where they have come to the conclusion that no one actually will succeed in the profession that has been so fickle to them.

In spite of their lack of support, you begin to develop your own unique style—well, not exactly unique—face it, there are so many writers out there all you can hope is that you’re not so very obvious when you mimic Hemingway or imitate Sylvia Plath. While you are struggling to please your professors, you also begin sending off short works to various magazines, and begin working on what you come to describe as your “major opus”—a work so dear to your heart that you begin celebrating its birthday and think of it as family.

In your senior year in college you take up with another young writer—you’ve been pretentiously ambiguous about your sexuality for a couple of years but you decide to settle on this dark young poet who writes his most edgy works while recovering from his all too common three-day drunken benders. You keep his printer in ink, make him breakfast and ensure the world doesn’t bother him when he’s writing. You try not to look hurt when he refuses to show you his work, and you manage not to cry when he mocks the few things you show him. One night he even goads you into burning your "baby". You plan to leave him countless times but every time he’s on his tenth martini and slurs that you’re his “muse”, you succumb to your codependent tendencies and unpack your bags.

Money is tight when the two of you move in together after graduating with worthless bachelors’ degrees so you take a job as a phone harasser for a loans collection agency while he continues to drink and occasionally write. After you receive an eviction notice because he spent your rent money on a beer bong and a party while you were out of town one weekend you decide you’ve had enough. You sneak out while he’s asleep and rent a small apartment across town. You decide to forget your writing dream and enroll in a graduate business program. It’s deadly dull, but at least you feel there’s some money at the end of this obstacle course.

Meanwhile, only a few weeks after you leave your ex is suddenly discovered as a “bright new literary star”, which simply means that he had the good fortune to step into traffic and be hit by Oprah’s chauffeur. Fearing a lawsuit, Oprah befriends him and puts his poetry anthology “Blood in my Urine” on her monthly book club recommended list. Soon your old boyfriend is being feted by pretentious semiliterates throughout the English-speaking world, while you write insincere papers for soulless business professors. It shocks you when your suddenly successful ex calls you and invites you for dinner. He had hired a private investigator to unravel the mystery of your sudden disappearance, and once he has found you, he immediately proposes.

Your heart overrules your doubts and you say yes. Within a few days you’ve once again moved in together and you’re suddenly sharing the fruits of his newfound wealth. He boasts of his six-month long sobriety to you, but within another month the two of you are screaming at each other daily and you realize sadly that it was the drunk you fell in love with, and his sober self is a tiresome bore. You resolve to leave one night when he’s in the middle of a rant about your many shortcomings when suddenly he stops, clutches his chest and then falls to the floor, dead.

The outpouring of grief by his admiring public is intense but shortlived. As you are cleaning out his den a few weeks later, you discover some unpublished poems and take them to his publisher. Soon you’re collecting royalties for the posthumous anthology and you realize that there’s still some money left in his reputation. You quietly begin writing bogus poetry you attribute to him—long hours of listening to his cynical diatribes have made you uniquely qualified to counterfeit his work.

It’s only when you get even greedier and recycle some of your old work from college that an old teaching assistant from your former university blows the whistle on you and your lucrative income vanishes instantly. Because you were unprepared for it, you had no chance to save, and before long you’re desperate for cash. Unfortunately the writing bug has returned to you full force and you cannot bring yourself to return to the mundane demands of any other career. Still, your work is hardly of a caliber to attract attention in the right circles, and before long you are forced to turn to writing pornography—a 150 page predictable piece of trash pays a few hundred dollars, and your prose is a slight cut above the tripe most of your fellow pornographers produce.

If you’re lucky, one day you’ll get a chance to write a screenplay for one of your novels. I doubt it will be difficult.