"When I was fifteen, I said to my mother: 'I've discovered my vocation. I want to be a writer.'
'My dear,' she replied sadly, 'your father is an engineer. He's a logical, reasonable man with a very clear vision of the world. Do you actually know what it means to be a writer?'
'Being someone who writes books.'
'Your Uncle Haroldo, who is a doctor, also writes books and has even published some. If you study engineering you can always write in your spare time.'
'No, Mama. I want to be a writer, not an engineer who writes books.'
'But have you ever met a writer? Have you ever seen a writer?'
'Never. Only in photographs.'
'So, how can you possibly want to be a writer if you don't really know what it means?'
In order to answer my mother's question, I decided to do some research. This is what I learnt about what being a writer meant, one that I wanted to persue.
(a) A writer always wears glasses and never combs his hair. Half the time he feels angry about everything and the other half depressed. He spends most of his life in bars, arguing with other dishevelled, bespectacled writer. He says very 'deep' things. He always has amazing ideas for the plot of his next novel, and hates the one he has just published.
(b) A writer has a duty and an obligation never to be understood by his own generation; convinced, as he is, that he has been born into an age of mediocrity, he believes that being understood would mean losing his chance of ever being a genius. A writer revises and rewrites each sentence many times. The vocabulary of the average man is made up of 3,000 words; a real writer never uses any of these, because there are another 189,000 in the dictionary, and he is not the average man.
(c) Only other writes can understand what a writer is trying to ssay Even so, he secretly hates all other writers.
(d) A writer understands about things with alarming names, like semiotics, epistmology, neoconcretism.
