It Bugs Me That My Friend Claims to Be a Writer But Never Writes: Am I the Literary Asshole?

Hello and welcome back to Am I the Literary Asshole? I’m your host, Kristen Arnett, and I’m still cleaning up hurricane debris. A giant tree fell in our backyard and it’s taken days to try and get some work done on it. That’s not a joke, but you know what? Not everything can be, and that’s okay!

Today I thought I could answer your questions while I crack open a few of my leftover hurricane beers. Hurricane beers are what you stockpile for when the power goes out and the wind blows and you just need to get drunk so you don’t cry about a tree falling on your house. I truly love Florida and the weather this year has scared the shit out of me. Again, that’s not a joke, but we must say the important things even if they are hard.

This is officially the 20th edition of this drunken advice column. And that’s reason enough to celebrate, isn’t it? I’m grateful for all of you.

Now, let’s crack open a (hopefully) cold one and get right down the business!

1) Hi! I’m at the point of writing acknowledgements, and have had two agents. The first one has his fingerprints all over my book, but dropped me. Not dramatically, they were cutting clients, but it was still difficult and I don’t harbor much gratitude because of it. My current agent has worked with this book, and I consider him to be its true champion. Do I need to thank the first agent, to not be a total jerk? I genuinely never want to mention this agent or agency, but the book has many of his contributions.

Hmm… This is an interesting question!

On its surface, we can look at what we know from the facts provided: your former agent did a lot of work with you for this book, so in theory, they could be thanked in the acknowledgements. But should they? After all, they dropped you before the book’s publication (and you have some bad feelings toward them and the agency now, which in my opinion is completely understandable). They abandoned you. Are they owed a place in your acknowledgements?

The short answer (and I feel the correct one) is no, they are not owed an acknowledgement from you when it comes to the publication of this book. My reasoning for this? Nobody is owed a book acknowledgement!

Yes, it’s nice to receive an acknowledgement. It’s a privilege, truly, when someone lists you as a reason that a book made it out into the world. But you’re the writer of this work and you get to choose who you want to thank. Writing a book is hard work, and it’s an impressive feat to get one published. The acknowledgements are a place where you get to thank the people of your choosing who helped make this book possible.

It’s a gift. And nobody is “owed” a present.

You don’t want to thank this particular agent and that’s perfectly fine. Plenty of people think they should be thanked for help with someone else’s art, but the truth of the matter is that only we get to decide whose names makes it into those scant and precious back pages.

Thank the people you want to thank! You deserve to only feel happy about this incredible accomplishment. Congrats!

Time for another beer and another question.

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2) I’m in a small writer’s group with a friend who for many years hasn’t written a thing. It started out as just a handful of us as friends (read: drinking buddies), and as the years went on, our writing leaned closer and closer, and while we still spend time together casually, we have regular writing workshops. Now some of us are published, and these writing nights are quite precious. 

This friend got his creative writing degree and chose another path, loved reading, and still in his heart feels like he’s going to be an author (all great—he very well could be, and he is very talented). However, it’s the great heartache of his life that he doesn’t write. We hear about it all the time, and it’s been years. I love having him at our workshops, because he gives great feedback, but so often we get pulled into his saga of how he can’t write these days. It’s never the right time, he doesn’t have the confidence or time, he doesn’t have the right story, etc. Specifically, I want to know how you would respond to this, so that it’s not a focal point every time. He wants to be there, he wants to write, and we want him to be there and we want him to write (we just don’t want to do the song and dance, it’s exhausting, and there’s not much more to say—and my true feelings of “that all literally doesn’t matter, if you want it badly enough you will write” are definitely not appropriate).

Oh buddy! This is a particular tough question because it sounds like you care for this particular friend and you wouldn’t want to lose him.

It’s tough when people are their own worst enemy. In this case, it seems as though this friend of yours has fallen into the habit of not-writing and has made not-writing into his actual writing routine. His sole purpose in attending these events is to simply discuss and list all the reasons that he’s not capable of writing.

I’m very interested in the fact that this is a writing group and he still attends though he hasn’t written anything in quite a while. I have to imagine that he still gets a lot out of this even though he hasn’t written a single word in years. Why else would he keep showing up?

Since you want to keep this friend—and you admit that he is a pretty solid writer—I would caution you to consider letting this matter drop. It sounds as though it’s very frustrating to continually hear all the excuses he has for not writing, but unless you’re willing to have a very frank and hard discussion with him about how he makes excuses instead of making work, I don’t really see how much of this could change.

Unless you’re willing to change the shape of your workshops? At least for a bit.

Hear me out!

What if instead of meeting up how you normally would for these workshops, you all agree to make some of them (not all of them) into productive sessions? If your fellow workshop friends agreed, every so often you could have a workshop day that’s simply generative. Perhaps you could all take turns providing a prompt—or something similar—and on these specific occasions, everyone who attends has to sit down and generate work together for an hour. If this friend shows up, then he would sit down with all of you and spend the hour writing.

It’s totally possible that this is a writer who simply needs some strong encouragement in order to get that stuck wheel in his head moving again. Hey, it happens!

It’s possible that this wouldn’t work out, but at least you’ll have tried something to get him out of his funk. You sound like a good friend (and he sounds like he is too, for the most part), so I encourage you to try a different approach and see how that plays out.

Best of luck, buddy!

And now onto our final question of the day. Cracking open a cold one has never felt so good!

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3) I have given authors I know and like five star reviews on Goodreads even if I haven’t read a particular book (yet) or didn’t like it at the five star level. I want to help the writer but I feel this is misleading other readers.

Friend, I’m going to go ahead and reassure you here: you can rate books however you want on your own Goodreads account! My reasoning for this? The criteria is simply whatever holds true for you in terms of “good” and “bad.” It’s pretty arbitrary! There’s no real standard when it comes to how a book should or could be fairly rated on this particular site.

At the end of the day, Goodreads is for readers. Whenever I have a book come out, I try very hard not to log onto Goodreads to see what people might have said about my book. That’s because it’s a space for them—the reader— and not a space for me, the writer.

If you want to give a book five stars because you know the author and you like them, I think that’s perfectly fine. However, if you want to give the book a different, lesser rating, that’s okay, too. At the end of the day, it’s your account—and your opinion—and that’s what should matter here.

Hope this helps!

Well, we’ve reached the end of our questions. Time for me to pop open another hurricane beer and once more brave the yard.

I want to thank you all, again, for joining me here. Life is hard and there is a ton of bad shit out in the world. It’s a real comfort to know that we can gather occasionally for some silly and harmless fun. Thank you for choosing to spend a small part of your day with me. It’s been a balm, truly. I appreciate it more than you can know.

And join me next time when we get into more of your questions. I truly do love them (and love all of you)! So keep sending them in!

With genuine pleasure,

Dad

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Are you worried you’re the literary asshole? Ask Kristen via email at AskKristen@lithub.com, or anonymously here.