The Boomer Reflects On The Nature Of His Beast

Jim Murray

8 years ago · 3 minutes of reading · ~10 ·

On Quitting

The Boomer has never thought about retiring.
The reason for this is simple. He would not know what to do with his time. Therefore, he would write, and because he has been a professional writer all his adult life, he would eventually figure out some way to monetize that writing because that’s what professional writers do.
The Boomer has several friends who are writers and all of them feel the same way. This is because no matter what kind of writing you do, you are always a writer and therefore your writing is every bit as attached to who you are as it is to what you do.
He knows people who write but are not writers. He doesn’t have anything against them. But he knows that for these people, if something better came along, they would jump at it and leave writing behind.
The Boomer has a friend who was, for many years, one of the best advertising writers in Canada. He was really good. And really successful. But one day he just quit.
The Boomer caught up with his friend many years later and asked him about it. His reply was highly philosophical. “I used to be a writer…and then I wasn’t. It wasn’t my life. It was just this thing I did to make money. The fact that I was good at it is important because if I wasn’t I would have found something else to make money with.”

On Being Good At It

The Boomer has never thought of himself as good at writing. That’s not for him to decide. It’s for his clients and the people who read the stuff he writes. One thing he knows for sure is that if he ever became self-conscious about it, instead of just doing it to make whatever point is in his head, his career would probably implode.
There are a lot of writers out there who are terribly self-conscious. This can often be seen as a form of vanity by readers. And it can cause the writers to start second guessing themselves.
It takes a long time to get to the point as a writer where you can make a stream of consciousness post feel like you have laboured over it for days. Conversely, it’s even more difficult to make a laboured piece feel spontaneous.
Fortunately these situations are probably not something any one writer will ever have to deal with. Because writers are generally people who are, via whatever hellish learning experience they have gone through to get there, generally capable of making the spontaneous feel like something they have laboured over for days.

The Boomer has a friend named Phil with whom he has written 30 columns in this very spontaneous way. They have written these columns very spontaneously because they can. They are both that kind of writer.
The Boomer credits his ability to work in this fashion to advertising. Because advertising writing demands that you ingest a lot of information, opinion and insight and spit out pearls of wisdom that actually motivate people to buy stuff.
Some would argue that this is a difficult thing to do. But these people are not writers. Writers consider this ability a rather lethal arrow in their quiver. Along with command of the language, an understanding of literary form and the ability to focus intensely for short, but extremely productive periods of time.

On The Craft

The Boomer doesn’t think much about any of this because these things are, in fact, second nature. He always writes quickly but only starts when he has a clear picture of where he wants to end up in his head.

This means he can do, in 30 minutes or so (which is how long it took to write this), what would take others several days to do.
The difference here is very simple. The Boomer is dedicated to his craft, and it has paid off by making him extremely productive.
The Boomer doesn’t really know is this post is any sort of lesson for would be writers. That’s for them to decide. What he does know is that if you don’t have a method to your madness, you will simply have madness, and, well nobody wants to read that shit, do they?
This of course, is just the Boomer’s opinion. And in this day and age of people not caring for opinions that don’t sync up with their own, it’s probably not worth much in the greater scheme of things. But then again, the greater scheme of things has pretty much be a fucking mess for as long as he can remember.

This is Boomer Post #7. Other posts in this series can be read at:
https://www.bebee.com/@jim-murray

Jim Murray is a marketer and communication strategist, writer, art director & blogger. His partner, Charlene Norman is a business systems and operational analyst. Their collaboration is called Bullet Proof Consulting, headquartered in St Catharines, Ontario. Bullet Proof is designed to help companies change their thinking for the better, to become more productive, efficient, more effectively branded and successful in today’s highly competitive business world. You can find out more about us at: www.bulletproofconsulting.ca