No True Scotsman

And Other Lies We Tell Ourselves

“If it’s not Scottish, it’s crap.”
—Patrick Stewart (SNL)

I’m into logical fallacies, paradoxes, and thought experiments. Especially when they have fun names like If-By-Whiskey, Schrödinger's Cat, Theseus’s Ship, and Buridan’s Ass—the latter of which is a real thing that exists and I did not make up for the purpose of today’s article. (I shall pause here momentarily while you Google “Buridan’s Ass” to confirm.) 

The fallacy I would particularly like to look at today touches on several of my favorite topics: circular logic, authenticity, gatekeeping, and monolithing. It goes like this.

My friend Brett—who also exists and I did not make up for the purpose of today’s article—is Scots as they come. This guy wears a kilt to the grocery store even though it’s December in Canada. Brett lives in Canada. He’s real, you guys, I swear. You just haven’t met him because he goes to another school. One day, Brett and I get to talking about what it means to be Scottish and I say to Brett,

“You know, the thing about Scotsmen is that no Scotsman would ever put milk in his tea.”

And Brett says to me,

“No, that’s not true. My Uncle Angus McArgyle back in the Old World puts milk in his tea every morning.”

And I say to Brett,

“Well then your Uncle Angus isn’t really a Scotsman, because no true Scotsman would ever put milk in his tea.”

That’s it, that’s the No True Scotsman fallacy in action. Do not confuse this with the concept of a True Scotsman, which is something entirely else.

This fallacy happens when you begin with a faulty generalization and then attempt to defend your premise against specific contrary evidence by launching an ad hoc attack on the proffered examples.

Some of the problems I have with this construct:

• It relies on the false premise that any group of individuals is uniform in their thoughts or actions (monolithing). “All swans are white, therefore, that large black swan-looking bird over there is not a true swan.”

• It gatekeeps the authenticity of someone or something—the person making the assertion is claiming absolute authority on who or what gets to be part of the group.

• It can be circular in nature. “No sane person would commit a mass shooting, therefore, anyone who commits a mass shooting must be mentally ill, ergo, all mass shootings are committed by people with mental illness.”

Before I launch into fifty thousand tangents (so far I have deleted one on circular logic and one on the incidence of violent crime in the population of people with mental illness and one on the incorrect American usage of the word momentarily), I want to look at some of the ways this fallacy applies to the writing community—specifically, to the large and varied community of people who want to write but feel like they can’t, because for some reason they’re just not real writers.

Who Is a Real Writer?

Who is a real writer? Who is allowed to call themself a writer? Who gets to decide whether you—you reading Shelf Life right this second—are a writer or not?

At the risk of spoiling the rest of the article, anyone who wants to communicate their ideas with the world through writing and then does that is a writer. If you’re a person who often thinks about writing and wants to write but doesn’t actually do it, then you’re an aspiring writer. All you have to do to drop the aspiring from your title is sit down and start writing something. That’s all there is to it. Other than that, writers come in every variety and type you can imagine. There are as many different kinds of writers as there are different kinds of Scotsmen.

If the reason you haven’t taken the leap from aspiring writer to writer is one of the below statements, if any of them resonate with you or sound like the things you tell yourself about why you don’t write, then consider that every single one of them is an unsound, untrue, completely false statement.

Real Writers Never Stop Writing

Some writers feel compelled to write all the time and they just can’t stop. This is the writer you get when you combine “furiously writing when they have a hot idea” with “always has a dozen hot ideas.” A good example would be Ray Bradbury, who famously wrote every day and never ran low on ideas. We have this idea that a real writer is someone who writes every single day because they feel compelled to do so. These are your Stephen Kings and your Danielle Steels.

Lots of writers don’t feel this compulsion to write all the time. Tons of famous writers are notorious procrastinators—lookin at you, GRRM and Patrick Rothfuss—and they only write when they feel moved to, once in a blue moon apparently. They’re still real writers. Some of them wildly successful, in fact.

Many if not most writers don’t come equipped with hypergraphia out of the box. The vast majority of writers have to build a writing habit to make ourselves do it regularly and generate publishable content. If you’ve ever told yourself that you’re not a writer because you can take it or leave it, just know that that’s most writers. Most of us choose it. If you don’t choose to write—if you prefer to wait and see if a day comes when you will be swept up by an unseen force that makes you write—you’re never going to be a writer. You have to choose it.

Real Writers Write a Certain Type of Content

Real writers write novels, or short stories, or poems. They write literary fiction, not genre fiction. Whatever I’m working on, it’s not real writing: My screenplay, my video game script, my album lyrics, my graphic novel, my blog. The documentation for my software. The storyline for my tabletop roleplaying game. The longhand journaling. 

False. All writing is real writing. If you’re using written words to communicate your ideas, you’re a writer. Technical writing is real writing. Expository writing is real writing. Journaling is real writing. If I had to venture a guess, I would say that most paid writing isn’t creative fiction writing. It’s all those other types. Medical writing, proposal writing, science writing, grant writing, copywriting. They’re all just as real and valuable and authentic as any other type of writing.

Real Writers Don’t Have Day Jobs

This one goes hand in hand with “real writers are paid for the writing they do.” First of all, I don’t make any money writing Shelf Life but I’m pretty sure it’s real. You’re reading it. It exists.

Most people earning their whole living from writing are not creative fiction writers. They’re technical writers, writer/editors, journalists, article writers, marketing professionals, food critics, requirements writers, ghostwriters—that kind of thing. Distance yourself from the idea that if you were a real writer, you’d be writing novels for a living or even getting wealthy from it. That is a huge fallacy.

Writers like Stephen King and JK Rowling, who have become wealthy and famous from their writing, are incredibly rare. They’re not even the 1% of writers, they’re like the .1% of writers. Very few wealthy writers get that way from just selling their writing—usually they’re selling additional licensing (movies, merch, theme parks).

Then you have your working-for-a-living writers, people like Jim Butcher and Seanan McGuire. These folks write a consistent amount of content for multiple series (usually more than one book a year) and their titles sell reliably. These people earn their whole living writing fiction and doing related activities. They probably don’t have another unrelated job on the side. These are the 1% of the writing community.

If you walk into a Barnes & Noble and look around, most of the books you see have been written by people who do something else to earn a living and also write books. The nonfiction shelves are full of books by people who write on the side of whatever their main profession is—professors, doctors, social workers, research historians. And a lot of published fiction is the same. Of the published writers I know personally, I can only think of one or two who do it for their entire income and those people are not selling a novel or two a year—they supplement their creative writing with other paid writing activities.

Hemingway, for example, was a journalist and also wrote novels. Or perhaps a novelist who did some journalism on the side. You don’t have to think of yourself as or call yourself a [your day job title here] who also writes. You can think of and call yourself a writer who also [your job function here]. There’s no rule that says you can’t.

Real Writers Have Credentials

Nobody needs an MFA to become a writer. In fact, I don’t think anyone has ever become a writer after getting an MFA—you have to already be a writer to get an MFA because of how much writing is required to earn the degree. You don’t go to Sewanee or Clarion to become a writer. You must already be a writer to go.

There’s no degree or diploma you have to have. You don’t need to be a member of any professional society or association, like the SFWA or the RWA. You don’t have to have some kind of special certification. You just have to make yourself sit down and start writing. Don’t trick yourself into thinking that you need any of the above things to be a writer. That’s the opposite of the truth: You have to be a writer to acquire any of the above credentials.

Real Writers Love Language and Intuitively Grasp Grammar

I love language and I have a degree in English and I studied linguistics at the college level and I am a professional editor and all my drafts have typos and grammatical errors. When you read a well-written novel and the language is beautifully crafted, you might assume that the first draft looked like that. That all those beautiful sentences just came out of the author’s head that way, fully formed like Athena leaping from Zeus’s skull.

I’m sure some writers write that way, but I have seen enough early drafts before publication to tell you confidently that most writers don’t do this in the first draft. It’s not called “the vomit pass” for nothing. If you’re getting your story down on paper and you see that it has typos and misspelled words, or the language is not elegant, don’t get discouraged. That’s normal. I know a guy who comes up with a new incredible story idea every ten minutes and can’t get through a paragraph without misspelling a word. That guy is a writer; he writes.

Remember, “loving language” can mean a lot of different things. Hemingway and EB White loved the English language dearly and their prose is some of the leanest and sparest around. A Donna Tartt or Laini Taylor novel, on the other hand, is full of luscious expression and their writing has one toe in the purple. Both of those extremes, and everything in between, are valid. 

Real Writers Have Already Started By Now

There’s no age you have to start by. It is never too late to start writing and become successful at it. The history of writing is full of examples of famous writers who didn’t start until late in life, so I won’t start listing them here. I caught an interview recently that I can’t put my hands on now—but I believe it was Leigh Bardugo—in which the author being interviewed spoke about how writing is not a young person’s game. Whoever that was, they were right. Writing gets easier as you age. For instance, compared with people who are younger, older people have just had more time to:

• Gain life experience from which to draw ideas and inspiration.

• Build a good work ethic that can be applied to writing habits.

• Read and learn from books, movies, songs, video games, and other methods of storytelling.

The older you get, the better positioned you are to start writing. Just please don’t take that as a suggestion that you should wait longer to start. The best time to get started is right now if you haven’t already.

At the end of the day, no one gets to decide for anyone else who is a writer and who isn’t. If you want to be a writer, pick up a pen or sit down at your keyboard and write something. Poof. You’re a writer. There’s no prerequisite, no credential, no training, no secret sauce. You’re a writer if you write. Want to be a great writer? That’s a choice you make, too. Don’t fall prey to the fallacy that you have to be a writer to write something. It’s the other way round: You have to write something to be a writer.

TL;DR: There are no rules about who is and isn’t a true writer. If you've been waiting for someone to tell you that you can be a writer—you just got told.

Coming up Thursday: A surprise! Because December is a black hole of professional and social obligations in which I am presently drowning. You’ll find out on Thursday. If you need to reach me before then, you’ll have to telegram me at sea. I am departing momentarily on the Ship of Theseus with the cat, the ass, the true Scotsman, and the cask of If-By-Whiskey. Do not expect a coherent response.

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