I want to say the classic flex move is human nature, because honestly, unless you’re Ty Webb with your “Oh, I never keep score…” attitude, let’s face it, we all keep score. Wait, Ty was flexing when he said that, wasn’t he? Cheeky.
Writers, the vast majority of whom are introverts, are also always in a competition to one-up each other, but in a non-competitive way. You know, because we’re above all that barbarism. As a veteran of several different writer groups, I think I’ve seen just every writer flex there is. I’m also convinced that this was the only real reason for inventing the “writer meet-up.” Consider that we spend most of our time in quiet corners, sipping tea and coffee by the gallon, talking to imaginary voices in our heads. It’s only natural that we seek our own, so we can compare how miserable and overcaffeinated we are, and believe me, non-writers don’t care. They think we can actually “just stop” doing this to ourselves, probably because it was how Nancy Reagan ended the crack epidemic back in ’85.
So yes, writers love to flex on each other the same way gym bros do, we just have tactics that are more passive-aggressive than every Post-it note ever left in a break room refrigerator. Here are my favorites.
The Word Count Humblebragger
One of my biggest mistakes was probably when I invited my daughter to join our writers’ group. I mean, kids in general are imitative, so it’s not surprising she took up the hobby. What’s annoying is that she’s really good at it. After the “heads-down” hour of the meetup, we typically go around and discuss what we’ve done. She’s the only one brave enough to throw out a word count.
“Oh, a slow day, only 2000 words, but I got stuck on one of the paragraphs, so it really slowed me down.” This is the literary equivalent of, “Well, I got hammered last night, so I only managed a ten-mile run this morning instead of my usual twenty.”
The Binder Bro
Similar to the word count flex, there are always one or two people who prefer to print their entire WIP and line edit the hard copy, like some kind of caveman. Sure, they claim it’s just easier for them to read the print version and mark it up with a red ink pen, but is it really, though? You’ve heard of Grammarly? Jasper? Hemingway? Microsoft Spell check? Why would you want to spend a week marking up a paper copy of your manuscript, then a second week putting those markups back into the electronic copy, especially knowing you’re going to gut and rewrite everything when you’ve seen the edits put back in context? You’re just showing off the size of your manuscript, aren’t you?
Now, I will own up here. I have my own version of this, which involves having my half-million-word life’s work printed out in a giant binder that I keep in the back seat of my car “as an off-site backup in case the house burns down or there’s an EMP from an accidental nuclear war.” However, I’m so passive-aggressive that you have to beg me to pull it out and flex on you … oh, but I will.
The Pen and Ink Romantic
Closely related to the binder droppers are those people who shun technology altogether and choose to write with a traditional pen and ink. Well, to be fair, those people aren’t so bad. It’s the offshoot cult with the antique fountain pens filled with free-range, humanely sourced squid ink and $40 Moleskine notebooks with chlorine-free, non-acidic, recycled 86.4 g/m² paper that really get on my nerves. You know, a pack of Bics and a spiral notebook are, like, five bucks, right? The difference in price buys a lot of coffee.
Rejection Deflectors
Rejections are part of the creative life, whether you’re a musician, an actor, or a writer. I don’t care who you are, rejection hurts. Still, there’s always one person who won’t admit it.
“Nah, that’s fine, I’m not worried about that chick at Harper Collins telling me my romance novel reads like two porn bots glitching on a dating app. She wasn’t one of their good editors anyway. Still, I choose to see this as their way of telling me I’m unpublishable, but in a good way.”
“Yeah, the New Yorker put a restraining order on me forbidding me from ever contacting their submissions department again, but it’s fine, I didn’t want to get trapped into that bourgeois ‘write for money’ lifestyle anyway.”
The Character Whisperer
These people actually frighten me: the ones who say, “Well, I thought I had the story all wrapped up, but this secondary character just wouldn’t let me kill her and insisted she had a much more interesting backstory to tell. So, we argued for a few hours until she told me her story. In the end, I agreed to give her a tragic cliffhanger in this book and a more significant role in the sequel, which she accepted after a long debate.” It seems to me this is textbook borderline personality disorder, or somebody really needs to be informed about the many tasty, decaffeinated options available at Starbucks.
The Motivational Speaker
These are particularly annoying because I’m not convinced they like writing half as much as they just love throwing out Tweets and Instagram memes about writing. Like “You have the perfect story within your heart. Are you going to write it, or are you going to hand someone else the pen?” Okay, first of all … gag … second of all, yes, it’s inspirational, but it’s also clearly about you. We get it.
The NaNoWriMo Veteran
I’ll own up to this one, too. “Oh, that? Well, I threw it together in thirty days for NaNo, so it’s not good. I mean, you can read it, but I know it needs a serious reworking that I’ll get around to someday.” Yes, I usually realize after they read it that I’ve essentially forced-fed them a transcript of me during a bout of Stockholm Syndrome with Microsoft Word during a particularly lonely holiday season.
So, comment below with your flex as a writer, or better yet, brag about it on Threads like a gym bro. #WriterFlex
