I came across an interesting blog post the other day. It’s called The Ants and the Bee. The author, Martin McClellan, shares his personal philosophy about writing and the related exercise of identity.

Here’s where the two philosophies of naming yourself come in. One says “You should call yourself what you are and what you want to be, because the naming helps you become that thing.” The other — the one I subscribe to — says “You are a product of what you do, not what you want to be.” It is all about action, not intention.

I got a similar golden nugget of advice from a Bahamian poet the other day. She told me that Inspiration doesn’t exist. Her philosophy is that writing “is work – the hardest kind.”

In this view creativity is essentially an ass-and-chair problem. If the ass does not get in the chair and stay there on a regular basis, there is nothing. The act of creation happens not in the glorious moment when an idea comes in your head, but rather it exists in the drudgery of setting aside hours of time to do the grunt work and then doing it.

I’m gradually coming over to this side of the fence. McClellan ends his post with this interesting metaphor:

I think of loaded words, like “poet” or “artist” or “writer” as the bee. Full of ego and pollen, bustling around. All of the intention in the world, all of the rights of the privileged. I think of the ants as the work produced. When you produce a lot of poetry, and you work on your craft and your work improves, it’s like the ants in the jar taking down the bee and destroying it. The work is all that’s important, not the label on the person creating it. The work consumes the label, and therefore defines it.

Toni Morrison put the issue like this: A lot of people don’t want to be writers, they want to be authors. They want to see their name on the spine of a book. They fantasize about winning the Pulitzer. They see the book signings and the readings. These are author things.

A writer by definition is simply one who writes. If you ain’t writing then how exactly are you a writer?

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