You see, the first time you supply this detail of your personality to a new acquaintance, you hear one of two follow-ups. “Oh, so you’re a smart one!” or “Wow. You must be rich.” If my years at my alma mater taught me anything, it was that I was neither of those things.

But if you really want to hear a stack of question marks at the end of a response, there exists another conversation topic, far more common, that strikes immediately at my nerve center of self-doubt:

“So what do you do?”

Hmmm. Do you mean, like, what do I WANT to do? Or what do I make money doing? Or, did you mean what do I spend most of my time doing? That is, spend most of my time NOT doing…

Yeah. This early phase of a writer’s career is not easily explained to people who do not serve the dark master that is creativity. People who visit a desk for a designated amount of time each day. Climbers of corporate ladders. Contributing members of society, I like to call them.

I’ve tried any number of responses to the dreaded what-do-you-do question. There’s the incomplete answer. (“I’m a teacher, sorta.”) Or the overly complete one. (“Well, I’m an aspiring screenwriter, though I spend 50 hours a week temping as an administrative assistant to a junior executive whose job I could do a hundred times better than he does, if I wanted a career in business consulting. Which I don’t.”) In moments of exhaustion, I’ve tried the brutally honest: (“I’m pretty much a bum.”) Mostly I just land on the default: “I’m an aspiring screenwriter.”

Friends will insist that you ARE a writer, and you should introduce yourself as such. And you must suffer these well-meaners, because they don’t know what it’s like to get the follow-up question when you’re bold enough to assert writer status. (Say it with me.)

Oh! What do you write?

The real answer, of course, is spec scripts. But then you have to explain what spec scripts are. Or just admit that, yes, you’ve been writing seriously for five years, but, no, you haven’t written anything they would have a seen.

These conversations are probably part of why writers are anti-social.

In the end, sure, I welcome the eventual financial gain that a career in screenwriting might bring me. And I would love having an agent who takes my calls and sends me out for jobs. Seeing my words reach the screen sounds great. But honestly, one of the best things about finally making it would be answering questions about myself with sentences that end in a period.