Writers are the little guy. They stand on the outside, looking in. As opposed to the big guy, who stands in the ballroom of the St. Regis eating clams almondine and drinking Veuve Clicquot champagne. I’m not sure if that’s what the big guy is doing, but it sounds about right.
Not all writers are the little guy. Some writers are very big indeed. James Patterson lives in Palm Beach, Florida. J.K. Rowling lives in a Scottish mansion. Don’t try to go and see her. Well-armed men with big fluffy hats stand at the gates. I’m speculating.
But nearly all writers are little. We hail from Milwaukee. Or Reno or Schenectady. I like saying Schenectady. It’s a little guy thing. If you are a writer who doesn’t like saying Schenectady, if the very word makes you frown, then you aren’t the little guy.
By nature, the little guy is disliked by the big guy. We wear the wrong clothes. Along with writing we work, and work hard. We live messy lives. But mostly, we’re not one of them. We’re the little guy, and they want nothing to do with us.
We can buy their books. They’re okay with that.
The books are all the same. The novels take place in NYC. Characters have plenty of money, and have high-status jobs, like psychiatrists or hedge fund managers. Even so, they get into all kinds of trouble. They are obsessed with appearance. They use terrible language, the effenheimers flying off the page. They have affairs as quickly and easily as you or I drink a cup of coffee, the sex acrobatic, often disgusting.
As P.T. Barnum says, whatever sells. Something like that.
Occasionally they write about us, the little guy. When they do the result is a caricature. There’s an awful lot of trailer parks. And fast food employees. One can drive by a trailer park, and eat in a fast food restaurant. This is the extent of their exposure. In the end, well-off writers think the little guy wants the same things they do, and dumb it down appropriately.
The result fails. The rich really don’t know how the little guy lives. They have to guess.
This is why it’s not so bad to be the little guy. Besides the money of course. But as the little guy, a writer really experiences what he or she writes about. If we are good, and I wish more of us were, our fiction is not a guess, but reality. Reality is the test of good fiction, odd as that sounds.
Also we don’t have to fit in. We don’t have to be like everyone else. We can’t be punished for not thinking alike, and maybe that’s where the resentment comes from. We can make our own decisions. We are free.
As artists, this is a powerful advantage. I know a writer who takes an alternative view of almost everything. She is offended by simplistic thinking, and doesn’t buy the rah-rah, all good no bad blather of either party. She’s leaning Jill Stein. She certainly isn’t voting Democrat, she tells me.
Try getting away with that in New York City.
Richard Donnelly lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Classic flyover land. Which makes us feel just a little… superior. He publishes a weekly column of essays on the writing life at richarddonnelly.substack.com