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Thanks for the thread. I've considered becoming a fiction writer, but have kind of put it aside for the following reasons and I'd be interested to hear the thoughts of actual writers about them. I was always a big SF reader. Wrote and submitted a few short stories as a kid. When I got older I looked into writing, more specifically Author as a career and the more research I did the more it seemed to become apparent that it was one of the most difficult jobs to make money at. Like, all those young actors who move to Hollywood each year hoping to become the next Brad Pitt and in reality having almost zero chance, well those people are guaranteed success compared to the chances of a new writer becoming successful. It's like a half-step above one of those modern Artists in terms of chances that you'll ever "make it". For every JK Rowling there's a million writers you've never heard of and who are barely surviving. The next reason was that it seemed like your writing or even the quality of your writing wasn't really the important part. Celebrity was all. A lot of the advice seemed to be centered around the fact that you basically had to focus your efforts on self-promotion as that was the real key to success. And that you're real job wasn't writing, so much as it was Marketing. There's an article I read about a book JK Rowling had written under a pseudonym. The book's sales were initially mediocre at best, until her agent revealed that she was the author at which point the sales sky rocketed. I also read some stuff about how the publishing industry is apparently a shark tank that drives this infernal machine and the whole enterprise ends up being very soul sucking. Now I don't want this to come off as too critical as I'm a layman and also because all of this makes sense given that writing is art and one of the ugly truths of being an artist is that you spend most of your time as a self-salesman and publicity whore, but it wasn't something that sounded very appealing to me. The third reason I was hesitant was just deadlines. I'm a terrible procrastinator and I felt like I'd basically be signing up for a lifetime of that terrible feeling you get when you're rushing to do you're homework the night before it's due. But I'm not so sure how legitimate a worry this is given that deadlines exist in pretty much every career. It just always seems like they were a larger factor in the writing world. So I guess my questions, for the authors here are, how much of my layman impression is accurate and can you correct and/or expound on my concerns about writing as an actual career? -Blackadder- fucked around with this message at 08:01 on Dec 11, 2015 |
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Dec 11, 2015 07:54
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