After scanning the contents of Bad Ideas About Writing, I decided to explore Holbrook and Hundley’s “Writers are Mythical, Magical, and Damaged.” I’ve spent a considerable amount of time defending my identity as an English major and a person interested in producing creative work, and am often interested in how our society works to rationalize what a writer is, what a writer does.

In the essay, Holbrook and Hundley break everything down into four major stereotypes that our society associates with the term “writer.” Firstly, the idea that writers possess magical talents for creating their work, and that in popular novels and movies where writers are depicted, the audience never sees the writer actually working through a writing process, the work is just suddenly “done” in the next scene or chapter.  The second idea—writers are recluses, and because of their magical writing gifts that allow them to put forth zero effort to create incredible work, they themselves are magical and either cannot exist in the regular world, or that they remove themselves from it. The third concept—writers are druggies and alcoholics. Enough said. And finally, Holbrook and Hundley state that writers, in contemporary culture, are portrayed as scary beings who, due to their inability to cope with reality, descend into madness or are increasingly eccentric.

My second reading followed the first in the sense that both essays discussed the annoying pairing of “the writer” and “exclusivity.” In Brooks’ essay “You Need My Credentials to be a Writer,” he explores the popularly opinion “not everyone can write,” and why something like writing generates this type of declarative attitude. Brooks struggles with how to not only encourage the belief that “everyone can write,” but how to bring those who struggle with identifying as a writer to write successfully. On one hand, it is difficult to struggle against students and people who believe they cannot write—to be able to write something, “…at some level, when we sit down to write we must believe it can be done” (61). On the other, we also cannot assume that everyone knows how to write and allow students to lean back on misinformation, a five-paragraph format and “formulaic” writing and, ultimately, fail to develop as writers.

I believe these two essays approach the same frustrations that many encounter when they approach the writer identity, the process of writing, and the writing community. I think Warner states these fears clearly when she writes “The idea that we can all learn to write in general is not just a harmless myth. It’s a dangerous idea that needs to die because it hurts students and frustrates teachers and employers” (31). To take this quote further, I believe that promulgating the idea that we can all be writers without first discussing what a writer is, or quelling the incorrect assumptions people have about what it is to be a writer, is itself a dangerous idea. The stereotypes or assumptions surrounding what is is to be a writer, how to be a writer, and what successful writing looks like are limiting students’ abilities to write well. Nearly all of my students came into my class believing that, like Brayson’s dentist states, that if they were a “good writer” then they wouldn’t have hated their high school english classes. Or that to be a writer, the writing process (as Holbrook and Hundley state) must not be one of effort or struggle, but something easy to work through. Then, laboring under the belief that they cannot be good writers, students refuse to progress within the field and fall back on old techniques like the five-paragraph essay that, as we “increasingly value…we move further away from valuing writing itself as a wonderful, finished thing that humans can produce” (Butts 109). Being a writer becomes an unattainable identity, or perhaps a “passion or a pastime” instead of a viable career, and writing itself becomes uninspired. It is the duty of the writer, or the teacher, or the student, to remember that writing and the writer are not homogeneous subjects, and that there isn’t one correct writing process or type of work. The writer isn’t only a mythic being, and the work that a writer produces is not always created easily or without struggle. Most importantly, it doesn’t take an inherent gift or a certain upbringing to be a “good writer”—instead, diligence, persistence, and effort towards creating should be practiced, and ultimately, to one should strive to continue learning about writing and the craft.