As culture evolves, it becomes ever more difficult to answer the question “What is art?” If you spill spaghetti sauce, is that a painting? Does a squeaky floor count as a song? If you say, “You, too,” when a T.S.A. agent says, “Safe travels,” is that a comedy-inflected performance piece?
Writing is among the art forms most difficult to define, most complicated to pin down, most synonym to yet another synonym. Fortunately, I have developed a helpful guide for the next time you find yourself asking, “Is the thing I have just done technically writing?” (Spoiler: the answer, almost always, is yes.)
• Writing is when you rearrange your pencils on a table until the café closes.
• Writing is when you sit—fingertips hovering over your keyboard, cursor blinking on a fresh blank document—and open Twitter for the twenty-eighth time.
• You can tell that someone is a writer because she’ll have a pencil behind her ear, a Moleskine notebook in her hand, a pen behind her other ear, coffee on her breath and shirt, eyes that beg for your approval, and a Sharpie she’s somehow hidden in her hair. (...)
• You officially become a writer when you own more than one laptop sticker. (If the first sticker is from a local NPR station, just the one will do.)
• A key sign of writing is letters happening in a specific order. If you can read the letters, that’s prose. If the letters are a little jumbled, that’s poetry. If the letters are grouped in threes with other symbols, that’s actually a pay phone which, if you think about it, is kind of spoken-word writing.
Writing is among the art forms most difficult to define, most complicated to pin down, most synonym to yet another synonym. Fortunately, I have developed a helpful guide for the next time you find yourself asking, “Is the thing I have just done technically writing?” (Spoiler: the answer, almost always, is yes.)
• Writing is when you rearrange your pencils on a table until the café closes.• Writing is when you sit—fingertips hovering over your keyboard, cursor blinking on a fresh blank document—and open Twitter for the twenty-eighth time.
• You can tell that someone is a writer because she’ll have a pencil behind her ear, a Moleskine notebook in her hand, a pen behind her other ear, coffee on her breath and shirt, eyes that beg for your approval, and a Sharpie she’s somehow hidden in her hair. (...)
• You officially become a writer when you own more than one laptop sticker. (If the first sticker is from a local NPR station, just the one will do.)
• A key sign of writing is letters happening in a specific order. If you can read the letters, that’s prose. If the letters are a little jumbled, that’s poetry. If the letters are grouped in threes with other symbols, that’s actually a pay phone which, if you think about it, is kind of spoken-word writing.
by Mia Mercado, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Iya Forbes / Getty
