What does it ACTUALLY mean to be a writer?

On job descriptions that work for you

Recently, I read (most of) Tiffany Dufu’s book Drop the Ball.

In the book, Dufu uses her life story as a framework to analyze her struggles with perfectionism and her eventual realization that doing it / having it all is a misogynist fairy tale (which is redundant but…you get it). I really like the memoir sections - her tone is funny and circumspect, and her advice is really smart. These sections alone make it worth the read.

But I’d also recommend the book for another reason: the exercises. In particular, the exercises involving writing your own job descriptions.

I know this isn’t the best time to talk about job descriptions….

The economy is chaos, people are getting laid off and then called back and then laid off again and then put on a rocketship to Jupiter and then returned to earth and ask to become strawberry farmers or starlight harvesters or something else that is the complete opposite of their life’s work in foreign aid or education or press freedom or whatever people at the general services administration do.*

But hear me out: this isn’t a job description exercise that’s about capitalism.

This is a job description exercise that’s about what’s important to you.

*I’ve learned that the less I know about the agency, the more crucial they turn out to be, so hats off to you, GSA!

Dufu says that the roles we’re handed are b**s***, and that we should redefine them. I agree!

For example, she is a sister and a wife and a mother and also a super successful fundraiser and a badass writer. When she realized how many roles / jobs she was handling, she decided balance out her time so she spent her effort on the parts of these roles that were important to her.

To figure out what each of her roles entailed, she wrote job descriptions for each of them. That’s when the lightbulb went off!

Dufu’s had been feeling guilty about her role as a mother. She never made cookies for bake sales, couldn’t attend every parent teacher night, and didn’t drive her kids to a million after school activities. She thought that meant she was failing.

Then she wrote her job description and realized that none of this was important: what was important was connecting with her kids in real and meaningful ways.

Suddenly, her guilt fell away. She connected with her kids every day! They had great conversations! They knew she cared about them!

She was doing her job! Just not the way society told her it should be done!

I, of course, read this and thought, “Oh, crap. I need to do this for being a writer!”

Brace yourselves: incoming sincerity!

When I sat down to write my writerly job description - which, by the way, I did in preparation for our Finish Your Book Accountability Group, and would love to do in a coaching session with you - I expected I would create something that had to do with writing a ton of books and getting paid for art and being a public figure and blah blah blah blah blah. All of which, by the way, I’ve been failing at miserably for at least the past couple of years.

BUT THAT IS NOT WHAT I WROTE!!! In fact, what I wrote was totally divorced from capitalism and productivity and even, to some extent, from creativity!

Here’s what I came up with - it is so out of character I wonder if maybe I was temporarily possessed by a profoundly reflective feminist fox spirit. Or something. (Clearly I am making jokes because I am nervous about what I wrote so as my therapist would say STOP DEFLECTING WITH HUMOR AND GET SERIOUS.) Here it is:

My writerly job description:

· To be vulnerable and access emotions in courageous ways.

· To generate language and analysis others can use to better their own lives.

· To build community and support other writers by holding the door open behind me.

· To help readers see themselves and imagine new futures in my work.

Sign up for coaching sessions and get that prose polished / start that writing life!

WTF?!! Where did this come from?

My job description wasn’t about publishing. It wasn’t even about making art. It was about healing and community and vulnerability and all these other things I knew I valued, but I didn’t know were so tied up in my job / art / writerly persona.

Despite the fact that I am SUPER embarrassed about this - I cannot completely articulate why, but don’t worry, I’ll save that for my therapist(s) - I am also kind of proud. Because this is a job description that makes me feel better about what I do as an artist.

It doesn’t require me to publish a ton of books and win a ton of awards.

It doesn’t require me to make a ton of money from my art.

It doesn’t even require a ton of people to read my art.

All it requires is that I do my best, every day, to use what I know to make the world a better place.

Now it’s your turn: what’s your writerly / artistic job description?

For a lot of people, publicly calling themselves a writer is a major milestone. (I’m torn about this, but that’s a newsletter for another day.) The problem is that these same people (maybe you?) also set up all this arbitrary criteria for what it means to be a writer …or an artist, or a (good) parent, or an entrepreneur, or whatever else describes your dream.

But when we get down to it, I think that we often find that we’re living our job descriptions already. That the basis of this work isn’t about what we put out into the world, or what we accomplish, or even what we create. The basis of this work is how it makes us feel, how it makes others feel, and how we make the world a better place.

So…what’s your job description, for being a writer or anything else? What is important to you? What could you leave behind? What makes you hesitate to claim a job for yourself, and how can you overcome your hesitation?

Tell us in the comments! And, whatever role you play, I hope you find joy in it - not to mention a little bit of humor.