what should a writer look like?

[cacian]

A child asks: ''what does a writer look like''?
A fair question and so I would imagine an answer to please the child's imagination.
I would say: ''a writer looks like you only older''. Haha.
I tried to put my child 's perspective onto the answer. As children we imagine things and people different from reality. If only we knew.

So what would your answer be?
Pics or drawings are also welcome .:)

[Ecurb]

Writers should be fat or thin. Poets, starving as they inevitably are, should be thin. Historians, biographers and popular novelists should be fat (from lack of exercise).

Sun tans suggest a writer not fully committed to his craft, as does a general appearance of robust health. Smoking is mandatory.

American women poets should dress only in white, affect a ghostly absence, and never go downstairs. Russian novelists should dress in peasant smocks and wear long hair and bushy beards. English playwrites should have pointy mustaches and beards, and dress in funny, old fashioned, clothes with silly names like "pantaloons".

[hillwalker]

Celebrity writers obviously sport spray-on tans and fake boobs (that goes for both men and women).

Poets are usually scrawny, seldom wash, and women poets tend to have facial hair, chipped toe nails and poor dress sense.

Most serious novelists sport long, floppy hair, acquiline noses and dimpled chins. Those that don't are either American or dead.
The female of the species are generally frumpy and bespectacled - some are lesbian, or at least led sheltered lives. The remainder are power-dressers and walk as if they have a corkscrew stuck up their a$$es.

Those of us who spend time scribing on here when we should be earning an honest living are obviously the choicest eye candy avaliable.

H

[Steven Hunley]

I believe both men and women writers should have at least a pencil behind their ear or a pen...or a cigarette.

The men may be clean-shaven but not too much, as missing a shave or two due to your forgetting and all, on accounta you were working on your last chapter and all, on accounta you're dedicated and all.
Poets may have florid noses or faces due to drink. Dope writers must show a certain yellowing of skin due to hepatitis, and writers of the frozen north are sure to have a few fingers and toes missing due to frostbite, and ditto wild-life adventure writers due to wild animal bites.

The feminist writers should never be too good looking, as it strains their credibility. I like the looks of young Virginia Wolf however, and why Agatha Christy and I have never hooked up will always be a mystery to me. Western writers should always wear a cowboy hat. Men mystery writers should look as hard-boiled as an egg.

To have a good photo of yourself you should always include a pile a balled-up paper in a wire basket.( that so you can see the big pile inside) and your sleeves should be rolled up, and a pen or pencil behind your ear and some kind of device with your fingers on it. Typewriter, no strike that, make it computer, but don't block your face. You should have a serious look on your mug.

On the other hand for guys a beard is definitely in. It never hurt H. D. Lawrence or Hemingway none.

If any or all of this isn't to your liking you can always push iron and look as muscular as possible. Then you can run for governor, or if that doesn't work out, you can be Popeye. It worked for me.

[WolfLarsen]

The best writers wear hardhats. No, I'm full of it. Actually, I know one that's homeless. She never wears a hard hat.

A good writer should look like he can kick ***, because he can, because he used to kick *** all the time, but there's also something about him that says he doesn't wanna kick anybody's *** if he doesn't have to. The poet looks like he prefers peace to violence, but...

He lives in a neighborhood where you want to pack the Second Amendment if you can, because kicking the *** of thugs doesn't work anymore. Not that he wants to shoot anybody if he doesn't have to.

A good writer speaks more than one language, but he doesn't always speak his own native tongue properly if he don't feel like it, because he hates his native toungue, because he's speaking the language (and writing in the language) of his conquerors. He can't speak the language of his ancestors, which pisses him off, the native tongue was beaten out of them.

Poets look sexual, even when they're ugly, because poetry is very sexual. You look as if you had three times as many sexual conquests as Casanova, (without paying for it, not even dinner, because after all you're a poet you have no money). Poets always have condoms ready in the age of HIV.

Poets like to dance in the "living room" of their studio apartment. They dance good. They look good dancing, even if they're ugly.