Darren Shan has made a couple of very interesting posts on why writers write over at his blog. Some of his readers asked why anyone would sit down at a keyboard day after day if success is not guaranteed and, even if you are published, the financial rewards are often not enough to live on.
It’s a fair question, and one that’s not easily answered. Certainly if you’re out to make money, writing is not the game for you. The time and work you have to put in to learn the craft, perfect your style, produce the content and then maybe, only maybe, get published, is never worth the pay out at the end unless you become a superstar author like JK Rowling or Stephen King. Many writers, even after they’re published, have to continue in a day job in order to make ends meet. Publication doesn’t necessarily come with fame and fortune attached.
There is, and never will be, a magical shortcut to getting published; something Darren goes into in quite some depth. And yet, you wouldn’t believe how often we published authors get asked for that secret. Trust me, if there was such a shortcut, would Stephen King have cleaned hospital sheets each day before heading home to his trailer to work on Carrie in the toilet (the only space he had to write)? Would JK Rowling have sat, day after day, in Edinburgh’s coffee shops so that she wasn’t spending out to heat her flat while she worked? No, they would have flicked the ‘publish now’ switch and jumped to the rolling in money phase.
You have to work hard. You have to learn your craft. You have to write. It sounds so obvious, but there are so many people out there who don’t want to be writers – they want to have written something. Well, there’s only one way that’s going to happen. You’ve got to sit yourself down and press keys or push a pencil. And don’t start telling me that you haven’t got the time – an Italian writer recently wrote his first novel on a mobile ‘phone during his daily commute to and from work. He did it all in predictive text mode, then copied it onto his computer each night. Now, I’m not suggesting you start texting an entire novel but, if you want it as much as that guy obviously did, you’ll do it.
So, why do we write? Why do we put ourselves through months and years of stress, rejection and hardship in the hope that, one day, someone will take our work and publish it for others to read?
Simple. We’re writers. We can’t not write.
Tommy
