Quote:
Originally Posted by X¤MurderDoll¤X
"If publishing is a mystery to you, just call me sherlock holmes. all you need to do is write something people would pay money to read, then the rest is cake. you spend a couple years writing a good story and you'll be eating birthday cake all the way to the bank, my friend. the food bank that is, and the birthday cake is old because nobody wanted it or showed up at the party. anyway... nobody makes money writing, so why bother? did you know most writers commit suicide? guess how many ebooks I have on my laptop? go ahead, guess. 1057 the fact of the matter is I'm pretty drunk right now and you should probably go home and think about what I'm saying to you."
I wanted to be a writer once and that's what my creative writing professor told me, shortly before killing himself.
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It's true. You have to work your ass off for very little money. But you also have to look at the fact that creative writing professors usually have no talent as writers or gumption and rely on publishing (as he said) one short story in the New Yorker in 1978 as a pulpit for expertise. I know multiple writers who are managing to scrape out a living. Some of them actually a comfortable one. For every one person succeeding in any way, there are are one hundred thousand failures so unless you have the patience of a saint, a lot of mental endurance and get that there are a lot of bitter failures out there on the periphery that will tell you it's impossible, you'll end up being a dipshit with no energy who kills himself. I have a friend whose book, his first, mind you, sold 1000 copies in its first month because he had a fun premise that people could latch onto. It's tough but not impossible. You just have to remember that not everybody who plays baseball is Mickey Mantle, not everybody who acts is Brad Pitt. If you think you are Brad Pitt or Mickey Mantle because of your one piece of short fiction in the New Yorker in 1978, then you'll demoralize yourself to death wondering why people don't buy your boring lit fic novel about a professor's descent into depression after failing in the publishing industry in 1978.
02-01-2010, 07:42 AM
