Yes: Writers Are Artists, Too!

You are an artist. One of the things people forget is that people tend to stress that the artist of the piece is the illustrator, and this, of course, creates an interesting little dynamic because it creates a little man complex when it comes to us writers: All of a sudden, we're trying to prove that, yeah, we're artists in our own right. 

The problem is that a lot of people tend to treat writers as the bottom rung of the art world. Our talent is seen as needed, sure, and we even form the basis of the film and television industries. The problem is that because we form the basis of the industry, and it's easy to blame us when things go wrong because we're not even allowed on the set, it's easy to make fun of the writer. It really doesn't help that Writers Guild of America is the weakest guild in Hollywood; sure, when it speaks it roars but it speaks so rarely. 

The same applies to other industries. Thanks to content mills, vanity presses, and self-publishing anyone can be a writer and so everyone has an even greater disdain for the profession. It doesn't help that journalists are already held in contempt by the general public and "writer" is seen as the profession of last resort; if you can't be anything else you can be a writer. And we won't talk about the issues comic book writers have.

But...you don't have to prove that you're an artist. You are an artist, you're doing a lot of really cool creative things. Your art may not be as readily apparent as a drawing or painting or sculpture, but nonetheless, it is a form of art. Writing requires the ability to juggle a lot of moving parts, from characters and worlds to themes and symbolism, and we need to do it in such a way that it looks like it was meant to go that way from the beginning. 

So if someone tells you that you're not an artist, smile mysteriously while memorizing their details and remember that we can do something no one else can do: We can include them in our new book as a victim. Oh, and remember that we're artists: We just aren't as messy as other artists. Usually.