It’s hard to know where to start.

Leah McLaren is a well known Canadian who writes a weekly column for the Globe and Mail (likely the country’s most influential and prestigious newspaper.) She was hired young and beautiful, roughly 20 years ago, supported not just by her ability, but also her impeccable connections within the Toronto media and downtown culture. Her columns have always been highly personal, dealing first with being single in the city, and then morphing into whatever stage of life she had entered.

It’s been easy enough to dislike, or at the very least, resent her.

Attractive, affluent and sophisticated, she was the kind of WASP archetype that hovered above the rest, and each week as she unearthed some small epiphany buried within her culture of privilege, the column managed to read like an invitation to a party you would never be asked to attend. As such, she’s always been a lightning rod for reader discontent, and this week it flared up again.

The column which sparked it was a weird one.

https://web.archive.org/web/20170322214423/http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/leah-mclaren-the-joy-and-politics-of-breastfeeding-someone-elses-baby/article34386363/

In short, when she was about 25 she was at a house party where everybody was little bit older than her. They had children and spouses, these people, and Leah, single and childless, probably felt unusually peripheral. Out of sorts, she found herself drifting through a sort of Lost in Translation remove,

ending up alone in a bedroom where a baby was strapped into a car seat. At this point, an invincible curiosity about breast feeding overtook her, and in spite of the fact that she was not lactating and had no idea whose child it was, she reached into her bra to remove her breast for the infant, at which point the startled father walked in and politely took his child away.

There’s a lot to unpack here.

The first thing I see is blind privilege– the unexamined belief that the world is full of things for the author to act upon. But I also get her curiosity. I understand having a weird thought and nearly acting on it. I mean, Christ, everybody has to understand that, don’t they? But still, the story really caught fire. It was taken as evidence that breast feeding is still seen as something shameful and perverse. That men had to attack a successful public woman just for being a woman. That the patriarchy must be broken. That women had to support other women. It went like this, and so from the real story, which was just a dimly remembered non-event, all sorts of other stories caught fire and burned through social media.

Funny that.

Regardless, the Globe and Mail immediately retracted the story and Leah McLaren was suspended for a week. What this shows us, as if we needed to see it again, is that newspapers care more about their readers than their writers, which is another way of valuing the advertiser over the consumer. As far as I’m concerned, the newspaper, which is responsible for vetting, editing, shaping and publishing the story, should have had McLaren’s back, they should have supported a weird, potentially very interesting story, but they did not. And so, writers need not bother themselves to look out to the oceans of comments for enemies, but can just take a quick glance at their own offices, instead. Your column, as I was once told by an editor, is the thing we put between the ads.

Dear Bitter Writer:

What are writers really like?

Ansell Pitt

Dear Mister Pitt:

Writers are the worst.

I’d be hard pressed to think of any single grouping of people, be they bound by profession, religion, ethnicity, sexual fetish or disease, that are worse than writers.

Writers are grubby, small, aspirational and hateful people.

The only thing that they loathe more than themselves are other writers. The success of other human beings, even in some cases animals, is toxic to the writer. If you happen to fall into conversation with one about something that is “good,” or something that you “like,” the writer will quickly, as if in a panic, change the topic to something that is “not good,” or something that they “don’t like.” They will do this in the way that a squirrel might scurry off up a tree when it gets startled. Writers feel diminished by light and joy, and will seek to suck as much of it as possible out of any given day. Never, ever ask a writer to make a speech at a wedding.

Think of this way:

If all the writers on the planet were jammed into one insufferable country, it would be torn apart by civil war and terrorism.

And then likely bombed by every other county in the world, too.

It would just be that bad a place.

Dear Bitter Writer:

Hello, love the very helpful blog! My question is book cover designs. What would go on it? Should the character be on the cover or should the cover relate to the content in the story? Thank you.

Samantha Bell

Dear Ms. Bell:

Are you some kind of a moron?

Look, if some other moron is willing to publish your stupid book, you should let them put whatever the fuck they want on the cover!! As a writer it is essential that you learn to be a sycophant. You must shamelessly align yourself with whatever the prevailing tribe is, and ceaselessly, but with as much elegance and perception as you can muster, lather all editors and associated “literati” (gag!) with compliments. Tell them how much you love the little, European scarves they’re always wearing and how cool their frames and tattoos are, and for God’s sake, if they want you nude and fully penetrated on the cover, you let them know how much you love their “edgy vision” and ask how many orifices they want penetrated, damn it!

I’m just starting out as a freelance writer and I’m not “connected” in any way to the decision makers in publishing. Do you have any tips on how to write a successful query letter to an editor?

Lost in the big city

Dear Lost in the big city:

A “friend” I know, after reading a really brilliant and funny and smart query letter I had written to an editor, asked me this: “Did you write that while you were in your bathrobe?”

Well, of course. The bathrobe is like the writer’s uniform.

This jealous guy, whom I will call Wilson and who doesn’t have a tenth of the talent I do, went on about how my 800-word e-mail was “doomed from the first exclamation point–laden paragraph.” He wasn’t finished, “You can smell the desperation. It’s obvious you have all the time in the world in which to splash words about the page,“ he said, “and editors are busy people, they don’t have time for juvenile charm offensives. They just want good writing delivered swiftly.” And then he paused to chuckle and say, “You didn’t really send that, did you?” Later, he posted it on his well-attended blog as a piece of “found fiction.”

Wilson and I have not spoken in years.

The point that the talentless Wilson was making was that if you write like you don’t have a job— like you have no compelling reason to put clothes on each day, you won’t get a job.

Because the industry is clogged with unimaginative nobs that are all sleeping together, they have little time for outsiders. The best thing to do is to keep your query letter short and sweet. Briefly flatter them, pitch your idea with some graceful economy, link to a few of the finer examples of your writing, and remember your job isn’t to be the “next big thing,” it’s to make your editor’s job easier. They don’t want to be scrolling through some windy pitch, they want to be out having drinks with somebody they want to sleep with, or at the very least, somebody who might want to sleep with them.

Bitter Writer

PS: Have you considered veterinary technician as an alternate career?  Writing sucks.

PPS: Do not add, “I am poor and almost 50. Everything around me crumbles,” to your query.

Please send any questions to mm@michaelmurray.ca or just post them to the comments page here.