Now THIS is worth reading!

Yes, it is. It is very much worth reading.

And quite timely for Ol' Girl. Thanks.

Oh yeah!

Yes it does. Nothing has changed since I took my first writing course back in around 1990. We were told by person running the workshop that we should not aspire to be authors unless we really were unable to do otherwise. She told us that we had a better chance of being hit by lightning or something, than we did of being published, and that even if we did get published, when we added up all the time we spent writing and editing the novel, our monetary rewards would translate to a few cents an hour. So I can't say I didn't know the score back in 1990, when I decided I didn't have a choice about writing.

I guess I didn't relate to the writer there. "What is there left for her to do but quit"??? How about studying the craft to become a better writer?

Maybe she has already done that. I can relate to this writer's sense of desperation about her writing. I am sure we have al, at some point, feltl so discouraged we needed somebody to give us a reason to keep writing

janetbellinger said:

Maybe she has already done that. I can relate to this writer's sense of desperation about her writing. I am sure we have al, at some point, feltl so discouraged we needed somebody to give us a reason to keep writing

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It isn't something you have done, it's something you never stop doing. This writer hasn't already done that because it can't be past tense. It must be present tense and future tense.

And sometimes quitting is the right thing to do. There is no shame in quitting, and no matter how long and how hard someone works, if they lack the talent, they are not going to make it.

I'm all for encouraging writers to try, and then to try, try again. But at some point, as W. C. Fields said, "If at first you don't succeed, try, try, again. Then quit. There's no use in being a damn fool about it."

There comes a point where I think false enclouragement only harms the person. Telling someone never to quit, to spend another decade of his life on something he probably isn't any good at, only means another wasted decade of frustration and depression, when it could mean a decade spent find his real area of talent.

Not everyone is going to succeed at writing, or anything else. I don't care what the endeavor is, if it requires talent, most people are going to fail, no matter how long and how hard they try.

The question of quitting arises if you're writing only to get published. Because as Miss Snark says:

If writing is your joy, you will be able to go on.
You don't need me to tell you this.
You know it already.
I'm only reminding you to remember what you love.

How can you ever quit something that brings you joy?

Sury

Sury said:

The question of quitting arises if you're writing only to get published. Because as Miss Snark says:

If writing is your joy, you will be able to go on.
You don't need me to tell you this.
You know it already.
I'm only reminding you to remember what you love.

How can you ever quit something that brings you joy?

Sury

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Good question Sury, but at the end of the day maybe people need to feel some sort of acknowledgement or reward for their years of effort and hard work even if the process was joyful. Would you even start writing a book that would take you years to finish if you knew that it would never be acknowledged by anyone? It reminds me of a question I was once asked.....

What defines art?
If you created something through the sweat of your brow and buried it so it would never be seen by anyone, would you still create it, is it still art even?
Or is it the expression to other people of your feelings, emotions intent?

We really need more advice from the guy who succeeded first kick at the cat and has never understood why it doesn't work that way for everybody, or why his story isn't wonderfully inspiring.

caw.

Misty_Blue said:

Would you even start writing a book that would take you years to finish if you knew that it would never be acknowledged by anyone? It reminds me of a question I was once asked.....

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Yes. And I have done so. The first book I wrote was an utter "failure" I had an agent, it was submitted to every single publisher in London, but nobody took it on.

But it wasn't a failure. All those years of rewrting, and rewriting, and rewriting again, made of me a better writer. And all that "failure" helped to create the new me. And now I'm really, really glad it wasn't published. That's a thing you can only tell in retrospect.

the next book I wrote,m I swore it would be not for publucation, not for ackowledgement, not for praise, but for its own sake. I would NOT even think of it being a success. That's the attitude I write it in.

And that's the book that was later snapped up by the very first agent who read it, and went to auction.

(and I was true to my resolution. I di dnot send it to any agent, I sent it to a literary assessment for help in making it better. She's the one who called inthe agent)

You might say that that was only one incident, and could I have maintained that for a lifetime. I don't know, But I think so. Because once you earn to write that way it really is writing for the joy of it, and publication, when it comes, is almost a side effect. Because strangely enough, books written that way have a certain charisma. It's almost as if they are destined for publication! And even though I was looking for agents with my last two books, I did try to keep up the "writing for the joy of it" attitude during the work itself.

And anyway, how do you know it is all in vain? What if you are reborn, and when you come back again all that work form your previous life has gone into making you a great, naturally talented writer in this life, one who just snaps her fingers and she's published? Huh? (No argument if you don;t believe in reincarnation. If you do, think about it.)

blacbird said:

We really need more advice from the guy who succeeded first kick at the cat and has never understood why it doesn't work that way for everybody, or why his story isn't wonderfully inspiring.

caw.

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What does that have to do with anything? I've been in writing or publishing for better than a quarter of a century now, so my story isn't the only one I know. I've seen writer after writer after writer turn into old men or old women before their time because they didn't look for something better to do.

Do you think it's inspiring to hear of someone who writes for twenty years with no success? Do you think it's inspiring to use twenty or thirty years of your life in one long failure that leaves you bitter, disappointed, and pointing fingers at everything and everyone except your own refusal to move on and find something you actually are good at doing?

People who try and try and try and never give up may be inspiring, but in the real world people who try and try and try and refuse to give up generally end up failures. When you hear about a writer who sells something after fifteen or twenty years, you'll probably find a writer who only wrote a very few things during all those years.

A writer who takes ten years to write a novel, and five more years to write a second one that sells is NOT a writer who succeeded slowly. That's a writer who wrote slowly, but who succeeded with his second effort.

In truth, writers who succeed may not always do so with the first kick at the cat, but they usually don't have to spend a great many years kicking before the cat squalls, either.

People say Stephen King write four novels before selling one, but someone neglect to mention that he write those four novels very quickly, and had sold a fairly large number of short stories along the way. He did NOT go years and years and years without showing he had the talent to sell fiction.

And, yes, William Saroyan received almost 4,000 rejections before selling his first short story, but he had already sold a fair bit of nonfiction, and he was only twenty-six when he wrote his breakthrugh story.

This is the norm. Writers who have what it takes to write pubishable fiction, and who write with any real regularity, almost always start selling pretty fast. They may not land on the bestseller list, but what they write is is good, publishable, and it starts selling before too many years have passed.

Slow improvement is one thing, but there comes a point where it isn't slow improvement, it's no improvement.

I did sell the first short story I wrote, and I did sell the first novel I wrote, and while this may be unusual, it's a heck of a lot more common than a writer spending ten or fifteen or twehnty years grinding away, and then suddenly writing something that sells.

What I did or didn't do is not what matters. It's what anyone can look around and see happening to others. When I first started writing way too long ago, I met many wannabe writers who had been at it for years without success. Not one of them has had any success in the decades since then.

When someone is writing regularly, talent just does not usually take very long to prove itself.

I think trying is admirable. I think never wanting to give up is admirable. But when taken to extremes, it can also mean a wasted life, and an awful lot of bitternesss that no one should have to live with.

There's a lot of nonsense out there, and such things as "The only failure is in not trying" are silliness. Trying is good, everyone should try, and try hard, but trying is not the same thing as succeeding, no matter how loudly or how often you say it. It simply isn't. And when someone tries to hard and too long and simply refuses to accept the fact that failure is real, and happens to the best of us, the price they eventually pay can be pretty darned steep.

The trouble with writing is that trying is way the heck too easy. Almost everyone has a computer and a word processor. They can sit at home and try like hell, with no real price to pay up front, and with little more effort than sitting down and punching keys. . .and with no evidence at all that they have the least bit of talent for teh task at hand. But, shoot, the computer and word processor are right there, and doesn't the internet say anyone can do it, if they just try long enough and hard enough?

Trouble is, this simply isn't true. Very few people can do it, no matter how long and how hard they try. We all have things we can do well, things we can't do very well, and things we couldn't do worth anything, if we lived to be a thousand and worked at them every last day.

I do believe trying is admirable, and I do believe that if you're going to try, tehn try hard. Half-arsed efforts mean nothing, and giving up too soon is as bad as hanging on too long. But life is short, and one of the worst things that can happen to a person is waking up late in life and realizing he might well have been a huge success at something he didn't try, simply because he was too stubborn to stop one thing and start another.

History is full of people who failed at this, then failed at that, then succeeded wildly at something else. And, unfortunately, history is also full of people who simply refused to move on, and died as abject failures because of it.

It may be a hard truth, but not everyone has the talent or the IQ to be a writer, and it usually does take a reasonable measure of both. Owning a computer and a word processor does not mean one has the tools to be a successful writer, in any sense of the word, and regardless of what the internet says, what other wannabe writers say, or anything else. Nor does trying long and hard usually lead to success. Better than 90% of the time, it just leads to failure, and often to depression and old age.

Worse, refusing to give up is very often really an excuse not to try something new. Not to gamble. Not to take an even bigger chance. Can't do that, I'm still tryng to be a writer. Really, I know I've been at it for ten years without one bit of evidence that I have the talent, but I can't go do something else, I can't find some other line of creative outlet, I can't risk my time and energy doing X, Y, or Z because then I wouldn't have time to write.

Besides, I have a computer, a word processor, and an internet connection right here, and I'm willing to keep at it forever. Isn't that all it takes?

Writing is still a worthwhile occupation, even if it never sells. I will never quit writing. Even if I never sell a single novel, I will not consider myself a failure as a writer, because it is the one occupation in which I can continually learn and grow.

janetbellinger said:

Writing is still a worthwhile occupation, even if it never sells. I will never quit writing. Even if I never sell a single novel, I will not consider myself a failure as a writer, because it is the one occupation in which I can continually learn and grow.

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Exactly, Janet. I am concerned about this concept of only being a success as a writer if you're published. Failure and success are nothing but concepts. Thinking of yourself as a failure, getting bitter about it, is a choice, and a bad choice.

With my second book I made the choice not to worry about success or failure. To do my best, no matter what the outcome. If I had not been published to this day, I can guarantee I would NOT have thought myself a failure, because the word just is not in my vocabulary. I would almost certainly still have been writing - storytelling - because that's the thing I do best and the only talent I have and the one thing - besides caring for my family - I'm supposed to be doing.

And I am really, really concerned about the dejection and bitterness that I see in blacbird's posts. I know that he's very talented, but all that dejection is going to enter his work and failure for him will inevitably become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Hey blacbird! Ate you listening?

Gymnasts, Olympic athletes, classically trained musicians, doctors, NASA astronauts, ballerinas, etc. must be willing to endure years of training. To quote from the How To Become an Astronaut manual: "However, to fulfill this dream one has to put in great amount of hard work and undergo excessive training."

Granted, I'm not built to dance Swan Lake, but if dancing were my dream, like writing, I'm sure I could find many other rewarding, creative, satisfying avenues to pursue my dream. I wouldn't quit dancing if I blew 2 auditions, or didn't make The New York City Ballet.

aruna said:

If I had not been published to this day, I can guarantee I would NOT have thought myself a failure, because the word just is not in my vocabulary. I would almost certainly still have been writing - storytelling

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To whom? Through what mechanism?

I'm not trying to be sarcastic here.

caw.

Writing Needs a physics class

Jamesaritchie said:

The trouble with writing is that trying is way the heck too easy. Almost everyone has a computer and a word processor. They can sit at home and try like hell, with no real price to pay up front, and with little more effort than sitting down and punching keys. . .and with no evidence at all that they have the least bit of talent for teh task at hand. But, shoot, the computer and word processor are right there, and doesn't the internet say anyone can do it, if they just try long enough and hard enough?

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Writing is an art which is a business. Therein lies the problem. People everywhere practice the art of writing for pleasure. Only some of those people can turn that writing that something that would make money, aka a business.

In most other professions, there is some level of competency that you must obtain before even getting the opportunity to try to make money off your skills. I'm an engineer. I had to get through a ton of classes, notably Physics, designed to flunk you out. When you got through them, you could practice.

As writers, we don't have that. There is no way for us to know whether our work is good enough to publish. There are no boards to pass, no tests to take, no way to validate ourselves until we try.

So we query widely to publishers and agents, who are caught in a hailstorm of mail. It's so bad you can't even email to say, "Hi, did you get my proposal?" Which in almost every other industry is the norm.

It's too bad there isn't a certification for writers that agents and publishers would require. Then a newbie writer, like me, would have to meet up to some standards first before trying to publish, leaving them more open to people who can.

And who knows if that is me or not?

blacbird said:

To whom? Through what mechanism?

I'm not trying to be sarcastic here.

caw.

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I would write one story after the other, and try to make the next one better than the last. I would try to make it my life's work, for my own ediification.

I would keep trying to get published, but if I didn't, the fact of my rejection would be the ladder with which I go deeper into myself to discover even better stories. Because I believe with all my heart that life is not about outward results and rewards and fame and glory and applause, but about doing my very bestm for my own growth.

now THIS is worth reading!

The search for answers to questions that have no answers rolls on. Whatever happened to "don't worry about things over which you have no control?" S. thought that was pretty much the mantra for the Oprah generation. S. also thinks it would be a good idea to stop burning energy on thinking about the answers to questions that have no answers, and write instead. That you can control.