Back in middle school, being called a poser was one of the worst insults there was. For those who aren’t familiar with the term, being a poser meant that you were trying to pose as something you were not. It was most commonly used to refer to people trying to look like they were “skaters.” In retrospect, the bar for being a “skater” wasn’t set all that high. I don’t remember ever seeing an actual skateboard in middle school. The main requirement for entry was to have these shoes that had a smooth plastic piece in the arch that enabled you to grind (read: slide) on hand rails, or stairs, or anything smooth. If you just had the shoes and didn’t grind? Or maybe just the GIGANTIC bell-bottom jeans, and not the shoes—well then, my friend, you were a poser.
I’ve been out of middle school a long time, but I still dread being thought of as a poser—way more than I did in middle school actually (I knew better than to try my hand at anything as coordinated as grinding, and the shoes were kind of clunky anyway). Except it’s not a pack of roving skaters that I’m worried about. It’s my friends and family.
Now, don’t get me wrong, my friends and family are some of the most supportive people on earth. And I don’t think being a skater is even a thing anymore, so I’m not worried about coming up short on that front. What’s really got me apprehensive is being thought of as someone who’s trying to behave like a writer, but not actually writing.
And where might one develop a complex like this? Well, for one thing, it’s not entirely, 100%, completely untrue. Tell someone, in a very self-important voice, that you’ve set aside time for writing, and then try to quickly minimize Facebook and pull up the one sentence you’ve written every time they walk by, and a little voice in your head might start yelling “POSER!” (or something more current) too.
That voice comes out often to stop me short. Read an interview with any writer of any kind about writing, and one fact gets repeated again and again: you’ve got to make the time to write, and to make that time, you often have to turn down plans that you otherwise would’ve jumped at.
Now, if I’m, say, Steven King? You better believe I’m turning down those plans. But as Nick Mercurio, that just doesn’t sound like a legitimate excuse. I often read interviews on writing as a precursor (read: procrastination) to actual writing. So, on more than one occasion, I’ve come out of reading one of those interviews and tried to start writing, when all of a sudden plans come up. Sometimes it’s going out. Sometimes it’s just my fiancée asking me if I want to watch a show we’ve got DVR’d. I never feel like I can use writing as an excuse on that first day, or that first week. It sounds ridiculous. It’s like your out-of-shape friend turning you down because he’s got to start training for a marathon—and he’s never run a day in his life.
It’s especially hard to use writing as an excuse when I know full well that all of that time won’t be spent writing. On some days, I can’t even say that most of that time will be spent writing. So I say “yes,” and trade the “POSER!” voice for the “you’re just making another excuse!” voice. (Oh, it’s a party in here folks.)
At some point, I need to have enough belief in myself as a writer to look other people in the eye and say, “I am going to write.” That’s really the problem here. It’s not my friends and family; no one’s going to take issue with the “I need to write” excuse—except for me.
Maybe self-assurance will come with being paid for my writing. Maybe it will come with having deadlines, even if they’re just self-imposed ones. Maybe it will come from keeping this blog going a little longer, and having something to point to when I say that I’m going to write, something to prove to myself that I will sit down and make something. When I can believe myself when I say that I’m going to write, maybe I can start saying it to others. In the meantime though, I’m free to go grind some rails.
We just have to find a time machine and a shoe store first.