Ever had to hire a salesman? Try the chicken test. “You’re an understudy for a famous stage actor. On opening night, he breaks his leg. This is it! Powerful critics and producers await your performance. The role: pantomime chicken. You’re on!” If the aspiring salesman gets up and hops around, squawking like a chicken, they’ve passed Part A. Part B: the salesman must perform Part A of the chicken test on salesman B. Oh, instruct salesman B not to do a damn thing salesman A says. I reckon a great writer must possess the same blend of subservience to the rules of grammar, and dominance over readers. Which accounts for the fact that writers outnumber good writers by such a wide margin.

Writers are, by nature, dominant. Although any Tom, Ricardo or Jesus can be a scribe these days (which must piss off monks no end), a writer must still possess a latent desire to capture—and hold—the reader’s attention. Sure, computer technology and internet delivery has changed the dynamic somewhat; from “Don’t tell me! It’s a wildebeest! No, wait. That’s not it . . . Damn charcoal pigments” to “I link therefore I am.” But the fundamental relationship between writer (leader) and reader (followed) remains unaltered.

By the same token, writing requires sufficiently large cojones to stare down the dreaded blank screen. Which isn’t really blank, what with browsers and email and icons and porn sites lingering in the background. But it is daunting, in the sense that a writer must consider his words worthy of someone else’s consideration.

Unfortunately, this makes many writers genetically predisposed to shun the craft itself. Punctuation, sentence and paragraph structure, vocabulary, verb conjugation—for someone who resents authority, all those damn rules are painfully, endlessly, relentlessly tedious. “OMG! Another English teacher pissing all over my creativity with their anal retentive Holier Than Thou bullshit. They can stick it up their semi-colon. Fuck that shit.”

I’m amazed (but not amused) by the number of professional writers who submit copy with sentences so passive you could beat them up with a single strand of overcooked linguine. Writers who actively ignore technological prompts and press “send” on copy riddled with spelling mistakes. Who couldn’t care less about the difference between arch, an arch and an arch enemy. Writers whose paragraph structure makes John Stuart Mill read like Ernest Hemingway. Which reminds me . . .

Scanning these alphas’ articles, it’s clear they’d rather sample their own work than . . . anything. I reckon any reasonably sentient being who’s read printed text has encountered at least one piece of work where the word “nice” doesn’t appear five times in three paragraphs, where the punctuation wasn’t blasted from a literary (if not literal) shotgun. At some point, a “real” writer acknowledges the fact that they are not God’s gift to wordsmithery, and loses the ‘tude. “Hemingway’s OK (a lot of people say he is), but I bet he never reviewed a Subaru.” 

Some would-be writers suffer from the opposite problem. They lack what my father charmingly calls piss, shit and corruption. Their natural subservience leads to prose so bloodless it would befuddle the omnipotent investigators down at the Las Vegas Crime Lab.

In the automotive game, these “rivet counters” bury readers under a mountain of facts, whose incontrovertible nature serves as a shield against the Worst Thing in the World (contrary opinion). Should similes or metaphors pop-up above their symbolic parapet, the rhetorical devices tend to involve food or women. Unfortunately, these turns-of-phrase display a stunning lack of sensual knowledge on either topic. Worse, they’re like a joke on a T-shirt; long after you “get it,” well, there it is. Again. Still.

This is not to say subs are as careful with their literary craftsmanship as they are with their subject matter. They share the egomaniac’s lack of interest in anything as petty as punctuation or grammar. They view themselves as a nutty professor who shows up at a lecture with their trousers inside out. To further absolve themselves of responsibility for following les regles du jeu, they not-so-modestly declaim their right to call themselves a writer (even as they make sure you spell their names correctly).

Luckily, I’ve been privileged to work with a number of writers who get it right. They’d no more think to leap well-established grammatical boundaries than jump a fence into a field containing a horny Brahman bull. But they do think. They think about how they can cajole, seduce, bribe, threaten and generally force the reader to contemplate their material. And they think about how they could improve their work, both specifically (through re-writing) and generally (the same way you get to Carnegie Hall). They’re open to the changes made by a sensitive editor, should  evolution ever deliver unto humanity such a thing.

As for a literary chicken test, there’s no need. If the majority of readers make it to the last sentence—without the editor making significant corrections, additions or alterations—the writer gets the job. Well, that’s how it goes down in my world.