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The Club I know what it feels like to be an outsider, to be a wannabe in a world where everyone else seems to belong to “The Club.” I understand this sense of isolation and dejection because that is how I feel whenever I listen to Car Talk, the National Public Radio call-in show that features two Bostonbased brothers who work as mechanics and love to whoop it up on the air about other people’s car problems. I don’t get the appeal of the show. All right, let’s be honest here. I hate that show. Hate it! How can thousands and thousands of highly educated, upscale, influential listeners—exactly the kind of demographic profile in which I long to be included—enjoy the banter of these two brothers (who go by the irritating nicknames of Click and Clack), let alone call them on the air to ask about their stuck clutches and harrumphing engines? Ratings don’t lie, however, and apparently everyone in the universe— everyone but me, that is—loves Car Talk, whether they drive a Ram-tough pickup, or a rusty Civic, or a gas-guzzling SUV for the sake of the children. At no time am I more aware of my isolation than on my family’s Sundayafternoon drives, trapped inside our ’ Ford Taurus (or is it a ’? as if I care), while those two MIT-educated radio hosts entertain my yukking-itup husband, as I sullenly work my crossword puzzle. Yes, it is a terrible thing to feel like an outsider. Yet, in the writing realm, that is how about . percent of us feel. In our heads we envision an exclusive club—The Club of Real Writers—to which we don’t belong. At the gates to The Club, discouraging our tentative approach, sneers a trivisage dog bearing the likenesses of Virginia Woolf, Gore Vidal, and that seventhgrade teacher who failed us in English composition because we started a sentence with “And.” Inside The Club, gathered around the ponderous oak tables, the Real Writers laugh hysterically over their glasses of absinthe at our miserable attempts to associate with them. “Who do you think you are?” they nasal. “Where have you published?” they snicker. “Don’t you make a living in sales?” On a regular basis, I hear writers talk passionately about the stories in their hearts they feel compelled to put down on paper; the sense of satisfying exhaustion they experience after a good writing session; and the drive that lures them at four a.m. to their computer table tucked in a corner of their semifinished basement, where they struggle with that stubborn plot point before the kids wake up and the real workday begins. Yet most of these writers inevitably end the conversation by discounting their own genuineness. “Of course, I’m not a Real Writer,” they apologize, as if they have in some way overstepped their bounds. Why do so many people who are writing feel this way? What propaganda have we internalized that leads us to believe that practicing the craft of writing is not enough to call ourselves “real”? And if we are writing, but we are not Real Writers, then what are we? Are we Fake Writers? Is there even such a thing? Doesn’t that suggest we are simply going through the motions, waving our fingers above the computer keys or hovering our pencils over the writing tablet, but never making contact? In the feedback process, our first challenge as writers is to stop listening to that collective chorus of naysayers who have lodged themselves between our ears, and who are incessantly whispering reminders of our illegitimacy— “You are not a Real Writer . . .  are  a Real Writer . . .      ” Here, I feel obligated to warn you that if you are unpublished, if you have a life outside writing where people prefer it if you simply pack lunches and earn a decent salary, or if you are even just a tad insecure, it will not be easy to shut these naysayers up. Egging them on is a culture of literary snobbism with a long history of disqualifying potential members of The Club on totally subjective criteria, including gender, race, and other bizarre factors. For example, I once read in a writing manual (by an author whose first novel I loved) that you are not a Real Writer unless you know enough Latin to read Horace and Livy. Say what?! This advice was from the same...

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