If you weren’t a writer, what would you be?

When I’m interviewed, I dislike interviewers who don’t know anything about me and read through a list of lame questions they probably use for all writers. I won’t play that game, so I try to derail it as soon as I hear the first stupid question.

Book Blogger: If you weren’t a writer, what would you be?

Me: Lying drunk in a gutter on the south side of Chicago down where Mickelberry’s Log Cabin Restaurant used to be.

BB: (Those who aren’t listening move on to the next question but a few rephrase the question.) No, seriously what would you be doing?

Me: Working as a feature film leading man while dating Helen Mirren.

BB: Oh, wow, what a life that would have been.

Me: Helen liked it. So did I–until Liam Neeson came along.

BB: Oh, wow, so when did the writing start?

Me: When Liam Neeson came along and “Readers Digest” offered me a boatload of cash to write about who was doing it with whom in Hollywood.  I used a pseudonym because anyone who told that story under his own name would have ended up wherever Judge Crater ended up when he disappeared in 1930. Actually, his picture rather messes up this post, but such is life. Anyhow, nobody ever knew I wrote the “tell-all” about everyone in or near Hollywood.

BB: Do you know where Judge Crater is?

Me: Dead.

I dislike the “what would you be” question because inept interviewers usually save it for writers when they would get better interview material if they asked a mobster how he got into the business. Most of the mobsters I know really wanted to teach kindergarten, but the family won out career-wise.

Great Northern Empire Builder at Glacier Park

But nobody asks the head of a funeral parlor, the desk sergeant at the local precinct, or the guys busting into the house during a home invasion what careers they wish they had. If you must know, I wanted to work for the Great Northern/Burlington  Northern/BNSF railway, but that doesn’t grab as many headlines as talking about Hellen Mirren even though it’s the closest I can come to telling you the truth.

Quite likely, most of us don’t know what we’d be doing if we weren’t doing what we’re doing. So don’t ask because most of us will lie to you.

–Malcolm