A quick look at many of the new books on Amazon that are from self-published “writers” reveals the sad truth of today’s literary community: a vast percentage of people self-publishing their own works have no business calling themselves authors — they can’t spell, don’t use proper grammar, and compose sentences that are barely intelligible, even after several re-reads.

I recently heard a woman on the Moth Radio Hour casually commenting that, after flaming out at her job, she decided she would “become a writer”. And then, amazingly, she commented, “The nice thing about being a writer is, you don’t have to do anything or have any special qualifications, you just need to start calling yourself a writer.”

That comment is both horrifying and depressingly true. A person can’t suddenly decide they are a plumber, a lawyer, a doctor, an architect, or a mechanic without having some kind of specialized knowledge and (usually) qualifications, such as a degree in that field.

But anyone who’s unemployed and owns a word processor can now suddenly decide they are a writer, and who are we to say “no”?

In Toronto back in the 80’s I was a magazine publisher, and when I tried to hire editors and writers, my newspaper ad would generate easily 200 resumes and job applications in a week. 90% of the applicants were borderline illiterate. Resumes were hard to read, featuring distinguishing qualities like paragraphs with no verb in them, or insane punctuation and a vigourous abuse of grammar.

After I’d slogged through fifty or a hundred of these disgraceful examples of a generation raised on sitcoms and not books, I was ready to hire the first person I found who was capable of forming a proper sentence. The search for actual quality was over.

And what bothered me most was the suspicion that, buried somewhere in that stack of ridiculously inappropriate applications for a literary position, was a truly qualified, talented writer. But I’d never get to that writer’s application because I’d have been burned out by the 100-150 non-writers who’d polluted the pot and whose resumes were unfortunately higher in the stack.

I believe that last year, there were ONE MILLION EIGHT HUNDRED THOUSAND new books published on Amazon! !!!!

Somewhere in those 1,800,000 books are some real gems, but finding the diamonds in the rough is well-nigh impossible, because there are probably about 1,700,000 (or more) pieces of garbage that are in the way, smothering the quality, and obscuring the real gems from truly talented writers.

There are books for sale on Amazon that remind me of those illiterate resumes I received back in the 80’s, and I have to think: who was it who told you that you should be a writer? Are you a victim of that new-age mantra: “You can do anything you set your mind to”?

Well, I have bad news for these wannabe scribes: You CAN’T do anything you set your mind to. I can’t fly a 747, I can’t perform open-heart surgery, and YOU sure as hell can’t write.

People reading this will say I’m arrogant, or that I’m discouraging new young authors, but I think that attitude is exactly why we’ve arrived at this place: not everyone who WANTS to be a writer SHOULD be a writer. We shouldn’t all get “participation trophies” no matter how badly we’ve performed.

Stephen King got 17 rejection letters for his first book, then eked out a living selling his books out of the trunk of his car to independent bookstores. That kind of adversity should be faced by every new writer today, and then we’d suddenly have a lot fewer “writers” and more waiters, waitresses, clerks, and millions of other people working at jobs more suited to their abilities. Anything, just as long as they didn’t suddenly wake up one day and “decide to call [themselves] writers.”