"Google the Autofill" - Writers Edition

Monday 14 January 2013

I got to thinking about writers the other day while I was writing my post about the Australian Women Writers Challenge for 2013.  I decided to play "Google the Autofill" (a game Amanda Palmer has been unable to resist playing lately, to her own initial personal chagrin).

You know how Google works - you type into it the beginning of a sentence and it autofills what it thinks you are most likely to be wanting to know, based on the amount of times other people have searched that particular phrase?

When you Google "Writers are ..." you get the following:

Forgetful (tick)
Crazy (tick)
Weird (tick)
Lazy (more fatigued than lazy really, in my case)
Engineers of the soul (I don't know what that is, but it sounds edifying to my intellectual ego)
The New Rockstars (bring it on, just minus the coke and the on-the-street recognition)
Insecure (tick)
Born Not Made (that hoary old chestnut)
Poor (damn fucking right)
The Conscience of the World (that does have a nice romantic ring about it.  I guess some writers are, except for those who write essays and memoir and who are apparently, narcissistic freaks.  Or is that only if they do it badly?)

It's sorta spooky, how forgetful and crazy are the first things that come up.  It's actually heartening, really.  I don't feel quite so alone :)

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