Writers are terrible people.

They are even worse partners.

You cannot depend on writers.

Writers live rich and vivid lives inside of their heads and often ignore anything and anyone that interrupts their thoughts. Writers can be in the moment with you, then – boom! – they disappear in front of your eyes as they wander off into the LaLa Land of their thoughts and plots and stories and arc and characters and endings and language structure.

A writer will think to himself, as he is getting out of the shower in the morning, “I must iron a shirt before going out for the day.” Unless the writer irons that shirt within 10 seconds, he will brush his teeth and forget about the shirt, lost in thought about how he can work teeth into a narrative.

Writers reveal secrets and intimate details. They will not reveal these secrets to their small circle of intimates. No, they reveal their most deeply held secrets to an audience of strangers. They do this because life’s experiences are just material for them. Here is an example from a piece of fiction:

It’s midnight. From about 200 feet away, you can make out Rita. She wades topless into the Long Island Sound with two bottles of Budweiser for you and Conor in one hand and a glass of white wine for herself in the other. The closer she gets, the more she looks like she could be the older sister of the actress Cate Blanchett. She is a lovely woman who is aging gracefully.

“Don’t you dare look!” she commands, as she hands the bottles to you and Conor. “Eyes up top.”

Now you have read about a private encounter that really happened to me.

You do not want to get close to a writer. You never know what or when or how they are going to dangle your intimate details and dirty laundry outside for the world to inspect. And they make stuff up, too, so you are never sure what’s real and what’s fake.

Writers might smile and laugh and be good at sports and love their children. However, all writers are sad, damaged people for whom the best therapy is writing. Why else would they live in their heads and shut themselves off from the world to write?

Stay away from writers unless you want to read about yourself.