"I would love to write a book someday."

Are you kidding me? Just what do you mean by "someday"? That you'll take a week off work, sit down at the keyboard, and bang out a bestseller? Oh, please.

If you're a writer, you probably hear the same thing. The other day, I was at the vet's office with my sick cat. Before the vet launched into a lengthy explanation of what was wrong, he asked me, "What do you do for a living?" I couldn't see the relevance (later he explained that he was trying to figure out whether he should dumb down--my words, not his--his diagnosis), but I answered anyway. Well, that launched him into a soliloquy about how he himself was a frustrated writer. He had great admiration for an author who was also a well-renowned surgeon, and he would love to follow that doctor's lead. The vet has a lot of great stories to tell, you know. He had such an interesting childhood, and so much has happened in his life and in his practice. And he got good grades on his college essays.

Right. That's all you need. Stories and a couple of passing grades.

I would dearly love to disabuse everyone of the notion that "anyone can write." Okay, anyone can, but not everyone can do it well. And therein lies the challenge. Great writing, and to a certain degree even just good writing, is transparent. That is, it is so effortless to read, and so elegantly done, that it makes people believe they can do it, too. It's sort of like a clean house. You walk in, and you know the house is clean, but you don't have to inspect the corners for dust. You don't have to look for built up cat hair along the baseboards. You don't have to peek inside the fridge to know that not a speck of salmonella is contaminating your upcoming dinner. Good writing is the same way. You don't have to dissect the plot to follow it. You don't have to outline the character arc to see why it works. You don't have to parse dialogue to understand it. Good writing just IS.

But how do you explain to someone, while you are waiting for them to tell you whether Fluffy will survive, that while you are flattered that he admires your chosen profession, you do not encourage him to attempt it?

So instead I told him that I always wanted to be a vet, and that he had inspired me to pick up a scalpel and a book on kitty anatomy and fix Fluffy myself.