Two words: Silent Bob. Maybe I was just the right age to see the grainy black and white from his first hit. Gloriously unashamed to be the self-professed D&F man about town. He wouldn’t be particularly funny, but somehow he is. In live talks he will make you snort milk out of your nose. Smith still smokes and laughs at his own lines before he can get them out and doesn’t believe in writing classes, which is understandable if you can imagine what some prissy wax-lipped insectoid junior high substitute teacher must have said about his formative Summer vacation revelations on morning salutes and adult movie stars he would one day have home to dinner.

This common horseshoes and hand grenades mentality is shared by a lot of writers, most of whom have successfully burned without notice or proudly embraced whatever work they’ve done that has downright bombed. You can or you can’t. The ideal of willpower and determination replaces what other writers chain smoke over as “the craft” and “natural talent.” Others work hard against the idea that they could ever be branded with public criticism. One day reality hits anyway, and there’s a lot of silent mental cursing. Once the idealistic fantasy of “talent” gets replaced with the personal determination to do anyway, belief can’t help but become a questioning fuel for everything.

For anyone looking for the atypical writer’s perspective from the recovering ’30s, there’s a blog on George Orwell’s travel diaries where you can find out all you ever needed about the foreign post office waiting lines of yore.

George and Silent Bob seem to have a lot more in common than you might think.