Screaming into the Virtual Wind

Why do so many successful writers spend inordinate amounts of time lecturing on the pitfalls and perils of their craft?  I can appreciate they don’t want to raise young writers’ hopes, they want to let them know there’s a world of failure out there and that in order to succeed you have to persevere and develop a thick skin.  That’s all fine.  But when you hear things like this over and over (below), you honestly come close to jacking the whole thing in, burning/deleting everything you ever wrote and settling down in whatever day job will have you, miserable, down-trodden and completely lacking in any inspiration or hopes for the future until the merciful day that you die:-

1. Most writers never make any money/give up the day job/move out of their parents shed.

2. Even if you sell your first novel, the chances are it won’t sell very well and you’ll never have a second published.

3. Writing is a miserable, dark slog of a profession, conducted in poorly lit, claustrophobic back rooms where you never interact with anyone, lose all semblance of a social life and forget what colour the grass or the sky is.

4. Your spouse will leave you.

5. Your spouse will have to support you (writers never make any money, remember?); and then your spouse will leave you.

I know there’s more I could add to this list. Every piece I’ve seen written on this topic (of how terrible/hazardous/crappy writing is) seems to run along the same lines and contain the exact same, soul crushing, whiny old toss.

What’s wrong with having a god damn dream, people?!

I don’t want to hear your tales of woe, I want to hang on to my image of my perfect future.  A future in which I’m able to write/work from home, afford a family and raise them myself, rather than having my parents do it while I sit behind a desk somewhere ticking off the minutes until five o’ clock and wondering where the hell my youth went.

For the record, this doesn’t mean I’m a writer just because I want to earn mega-money.  Far from it.  I’ve written stories since I first learnt to write and before that I made them up in my head.  Writing is the only thing I’ve ever wanted to do, the only thing that fills me with ambition and purpose.  I get excited about my characters and the worlds I create.  That doesn’t mean I don’t want to get paid for doing it though, because I live in the real world; and the real world usually sucks bigger balls than a lady rhino in mating season.

Selling as many novels as Stephen King or Dean Koontz or Anne Rice would be phenomenal, I won’t lie.  But I ask the universe for very modest things. I want to do what I love and pay the bills.

So, whiny successful writers of the internet (you know who the hell you are), if that’s my modest dream and you strive to take even that away from me… I wonder if you’re just chomping on sour grapes because you’re not mega names like Stephen King or Dean Koontz or Anne Rice.

Just a thought.