I particularly liked There are thousand upon thousands of things that you can do when you’re a writer. You can be a journalist, a songwriter, a playwright, an author, a screenplay writer, and more. You can be a till-monkey in Wal-Mart, you can be a refuse disposal operative, you can be abused within an inch of your life in a call-centre. You'll probably need to be all of those, because you sure as hell won't make a living as a writer!
Let's focus here on the positive aspects, shall we? Why being a writer is awesome for me .. you get to make entire universes and worlds happen, you can be a creater and a destroyer. You have the power to instill tears and yelps of laughter in readers, can cause them to read all night through to the ending even if in the morning they know they have to be alert. Just because they can't put the novel down. Because of the worlds YOU created, the characters which become closer than best friends or relatives to the reader who unsuspectingly takes up your novel. And because of your novel, the words you spent so much time and sweat on, the reader will change a little bit as his/her world got slightly more complex
I'd agree that being a writer is—well, not awesome—that's the Grand Canyon or an earthquake that reaches 8.6 on the Richter Scale. But lots of fun and an experience I've totally enjoyed. I love it, for many of the reasons Ryan mentioned in his blog, but I'm not a published writer yet and don't see myself making a living at it when I do publish. It's not why I write. Many well-known and respected writers maintain other careers as well. And many of them say it's not the money, it's the fact that a job keeps them in touch with the real world. I know I thought that after I retired my writing output would increase. In fact, the opposite has occurred, maybe because my life lacks the structure it did while I was working. Or maybe I'm just a lazy besom...?
When I was a child, I had one reason, and one reason only. You're basically God. You breathe life into a universe, create whole societies and cultures out of nothing. You create characters who live and die at your command. You weave their thread of fate, you decide which way their river shall flow. You alone have complete, utter, unlimited, undisputed power over the universe you've created. With one stroke of the pen, or click of the keyboards, you can alter your universe in any way you see fit. Of course, as you mature, you learn to compromise with your characters and people to whom you share your stories with. "No, I wouldn't do this because of reasons!" your character would complain, or "Why don't you include this/remove that?" your friend would ask. Still, you are basically God. You have the final say in what your characters do, which way the plot is going to go. In some sense, when your characters mutter "God damn it!" under their breaths, or attend a place of worship to pray, they're not praying to their gods because -- wait for it -- their gods were created by you! That's right, they're really worshipping and praying to YOU. When a desperate character kneels down in the pew and begs tearfully, "Please...please don't let this happen to me. Please..." who is the one force in that character's life, that character's reality that can alter events in a way so that whatever bad thing is happening to him/her doesn't happen? You. You're just doing it under the guise of the deity/deities in their universe. I honestly to God cannot believe I'm doing this, but there's a particular character from a terrible movie in the early 2000s that perfectly sums it all up: "THIS IS MY WORLD, MR. ANDERSON! MY WORLD!!" - Agent Smith from Matrix: Revolutions.
When I was a child, I had one reason, and one reason only. You're basically God. You breathe life into a universe, create whole societies and cultures out of nothing. You create characters who live and die at your command. You weave their thread of fate, you decide which way their river shall flow. You alone have complete, utter, unlimited, undisputed power over the universe you've created. With one stroke of the pen, or click of the keyboards, you can alter your universe in any way you see fit. Of course, as you mature, you learn to compromise with your characters and people to whom you share your stories with. "No, I wouldn't do this because of reasons!" your character would complain, or "Why don't you include this/remove that?" your friend would ask. Still, you are basically God. You have the final say in what your characters do, which way the plot is going to go. In some sense, when your characters mutter "God damn it!" under their breaths, or attend a place of worship to pray, they're not praying to their gods because -- wait for it -- their gods were created by you! That's right, they're really worshipping and praying to YOU. When a desperate character kneels down in the pew and begs tearfully, "Please...please don't let this happen to me. Please..." who is the one force in that character's life, that character's reality that can alter events in a way so that whatever bad thing is happening to him/her doesn't happen? You. You're just doing it under the guise of the deity/deities in their universe. The only trick is making it not blatantly obvious that it's actually you behind the smoke screen and mirrors, it's you with the puppet strings, you with the mighty pen protecting your character(s) for plot-related reasons. I honestly to God cannot believe I'm doing this, but there's a particular character from a terrible movie in the early 2000s that perfectly sums it all up: "THIS IS MY WORLD, MR. ANDERSON! MY WORLD!!" - Agent Smith from Matrix: Revolutions.
One more thing to add to the list: if someone makes you mad, you can make them a character in your work and have horrible things happen to them.
Oh the memories... >:} You could even do it to fictional characters you don't like. I remember writing a brief scene where Catherine Willows and Warwick (I think that was his name) from CSI arrested Umbridge for crimes against humanity, and when they engaged in hot, sweaty make-out in the interrogation booth because reasons, she acted like a racist asshole by saying a black guy should never mingle with white women. What did I have Willows and Warwick do? Kill her. No one else cared, rather they applauded Willows and Warwick for their deed. One of my earliest attempts at fiction had an elderly man who collected Egyptian artifacts in his basement and he was showing them to my young main characters. For reasons I still don't understand, he had the actual mummy of Tutankhamun himself chilling down there. Oh, and at one point, my main character became a ninja warrior by pulling a katana out of a tree stump. There was a couple I created back then that I really thought was well done. An elderly black couple who grew up in the Jim Crow days, and they had a locket that was said to have been from the RMS Titanic herself because -- get this -- the elderly man's mother was an Irish woman onboard the ship when it went down. She survived, went to America, married a black musician and this guy was born. This -- yes --was in the same universe as the kid who turned into a ninja warrior via katana-in-stump. In the same universe where one of my female characters turned into a zombie, but then turned back into human after my other characters found her soul locked in a crystal. All of that. In the same universe. Did any of that make sense? No. Did I care at all? Still no. The beauty of writing is that all the crazy ideas never leave for any of us, we're just able to apply a little sense and reason behind it all. We're able to apply a little logic when and where needed.
Why have you only named low-level jobs? Can't a writer be working as a doctor for a living? As a matter of fact, my father-in-law self-published his own novella, and he's a consultant doctor working 24-hour shifts. That should give people who complain about the lack of time some perspective, actually (this is a general statement not geared towards anyone in particular, before someone takes offence!) Anyway the repetition in the article made it impossible for me to want to read it properly. However, this line: The supposed "better" sentence, or so implied - the more in-depth one - is horrid. Now, why it's awesome to be a writer - 'cause you're painting a picture with words and having adventures that are all your own when you create your own stories, 'cause you get to pull and tug at people's emotions and play with their heads 'Cause playing with words is just frigging fun! Because I can't imagine living a life where I'm not creating something. I've often wondered what people do who don't create things, how can they not be bored? I've never understood how some people have no such desire to create - it doesn't have to be writing, just any kind of creation. It must be so... boring... never to create anything that is your own.
I suppose because, if you've got a well-paid, rewarding job, you're less likely to be thinking "If only my book gets published I'll be rich, and I need never work again." I heard that, before Fleetwood Mac made it big, Stevie Nicks was waiting tables (and bitching at Lindsay Buckingham that he, too, should work to support them)
True, true. However, like @jannert - I find myself less productive if the only thing I have to do is write. Work forces you to take a step back and keep you fresh, and therefore writing The dream of writing for a living seems never to turn out as good as we believe it to be. Not that I've had the pleasure of writing for a living, but I have had the "pleasure" of not working during my pregnancy and had all the time in the world to write. My days were dull as all get out!
Being a rockstar or a professional athlete would be awesome. Writing seems like hard work (and marketing even harder), often times with little to show for it. But of course if you're a writer, you do it anyway :/
For a second there I thought you meant my post was so bad, it's put you off reading in general And then I realised you meant it's made writing so attractive you'd rather abandon reading and go write Or at least I hope that's it
Ah that's what you meant. Well, show me a fiction writer who has no intentions of manipulating a reader's emotions then when you write a story you want to create an effect. The story that has no emotional effects on a reader is an ineffective one, and its author incompetent.
