This just popped back into my head after many years’ absence: the most annoying question I’ve ever been asked as a writer.
No, it’s not “How long did it take you to write it?” Everybody asks that. I don’t know why, but they do.
When, after much difficulty, my very first novel was published in 1986, one of my next-door neighbors, with a happy smile on his face, asked me this:
“So when’s it going to be a TV movie?”
Perish the thought that he would buy the book and read it, or even go to see the movie if they made a movie of it. He wanted it on TV. Cheap, cheap, cheap.
One thing I’ve learned over the years: people who see you every day, and talk to you, hardly ever want to read your books. And I don’t know why.
Many people are very discourteous when they encounter creativity. When I played music, I got all sorts of “expert” advice from people I would consider student musicians at best, but they always managed to say something insulting, or at the very least, disrespectful.
To that average person, publishing a novel is far beyond anything they could seriously imagine doing, yet there you are next door, a mere human and a novelist. I think that’s the crux of it; a lot pf people think that writers, actors, musicians, TV personalities, etc. should be somehow more than human.
The fact that someone can create and still be as human as they are challenges their self image. They feel the they have to derogate so that they can prove to themselves that you didn’t really accomplish anything after all.
“There are three things everybody thinks he can do–run a hotel, manage a baseball team, and write a book.” –Rocky Bridges
That’s mystifying to me. If you personally know an author, I would think you’d want to read what he wrote.
Here’s a guess: Sometimes it’s hard to read a friend’s fiction without hearing the friend’s “voice” overlaying the narrative and even the dialogue, which distracts the reader from becoming immersed in the plot and character development. The same problem doesn’t seem to occur with a friend’s poetry or nonfiction writing, because one expects to hear the writer’s voice there.