‘Emerging’ as a Writer After 40
longreads.com
longreads.com
What's sad is that I would have to be an international best seller to make more than I do as a software engineer, even if I published regularly; writing would not pay my bay area mortgage, and I'd lose out on tons of perks at work.
Trapped in the gilded cage.
Don't try to be an international bestseller. Just find a smaller group of true fans.
See: Kevin Kelly
See: Seth Godin <-- where I get much of my inspiration. He's REALLY good.
Oh yeah... don't stop coding. Keep your day job. Write on the side. Fund your dream. ;)
But you have a job, you don't need to do that. You can write part-time, focus on short stories, get a better idea of where your current ability level is, decide if it's a hobby you do want to pursue and to what extent, join critique groups, and then try to get published in short fiction markets. Short form lets you complete something, have it evaluated, withoug having sunk multiple years into a single manuscript.
The last thing an aspiring writer with a full-time job should do is get emotionally invested in a single novel that takes years to finish and never goes anywhere because they never learned to write fiction properly in the first place.
Given the dire economic prospects of writing as a career, it seems to make a lot of sense to wait until later in life to begin writing professionally. It gives you time to build some kind of financial stability first, and to have lived long enough to have more experience, and perspective as an author.
Do you by any chance have a source for that quote? Vonnegut has so many great quotes, but I couldn't find the one you mentioned.
“To all the talented young men who wander about feeling that there is nothing in the world for them to do, I should say: 'Give up trying to write, and, instead, try not to write. Go out into the world; become a pirate, a king in Borneo, a labourer in Soviet Russia; give yourself an existence in which the satisfaction of elementary physical needs will occupy almost all your energies.' I do not recommend this course of action to everyone, but only to those who suffer from the disease which Mr Krutch diagnoses. I believe that, after some years of such an existence, the ex-intellectual will find that in spite of is efforts he can no longer refrain from writing, and when this time comes his writing will not seem to him futile.”
from The Conquest of Happiness
And yet I never really stopped thinking about it, working on its universe, occasionally taking notes and making outlines. Only much more recently, having trashed most of the original science fiction, replacing it with more social and economic speculation, I realized what it was actually about – this story finally had a reason to exist, a mission. This is what drives me to write it now: Not the fun of imagining an escapist future, but the urgency of exploring a world we might find ourselves in.
My best idea for this novel turned out to be waiting to write it.
Reminds me of some weirdo bodybuilder on YouTube who advised a viewer suffering from depression to become a mercenary in Africa to cure it
Search for "talented".
This is such a great quote I had to read it in some context and although I've only read a few pages around the quote it seems that he is talking about tragedy and specifically the idea of how one escapes from essentially being a nobody in the world.
"...the death of Cinna the poet is comic, whereas the deaths of Cesar, Brutus and Cassius are tragic." (Speaking of the works of Shakespeare). The idea is that our concept of tragedy is bound up with the consequence to society rather than the consequence to an individual. So if you die having accomplished nothing of note, we feel that we have wasted our time -- no tragedy has resulted from our death.
From that perspective, I think he's trying to say that instead of writing because you want to make a mark, you should try to avoid writing. That desire to do something notable will cause you to ultimately feel as though you have failed -- we can never overcome our own ambitions. But if you go to extreme lengths to avoid writing and fail to succeed, then your writing will never seem (to you) to be a waste of time. It will be of great importance (if only to you).
It is the best choice I have ever made. I get to make great money, polish my writing and engineering craft, and day dream about my future fictions. In another 10 years, perhaps I shall pivot to fantasy. If not, I can point to dozens and dozens of popular, educational articles which people have enjoyed. And that will be enough for me.
This is deeply personal work, by a person whose life experience largely does not intersect with those of HN commentators. I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised.
All the talk about identity in this piece makes me think that is what makes it harder to shift careers: if you make what you do a part of your identity, then changing what you do can become harder because you are changing who you are.
Personally, I really don't think my career defines me in any way. My career is like a furniture for my life, and I like it to be useful and not too uncomfortable, but someday I may put it out on the curb and redecorate.
> Adams was 52 and working for the civil service when his daughters began pleading with him to tell them a story on the drive to school. “I had been put on the spot and I started off, ‘Once there were two rabbits called Hazel and Fiver.’ And I just took it on from there.” Extraordinarily, he had never written a word of fiction before, but once he’d seen the story through to the end, his daughters said it was “too good to waste, Daddy, you ought to write that down”.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jan/04/richard-adams-...
― May Sarton
It's exactly the same case as the article:
"What I wanted was to write full-time. Or, rather, I wanted writing to be my main mode of being in and engaging with the world. But I hadn’t simply awakened one morning and decided this. Up until that point, I had been writing part-time for some-30 years, snatching what time I could during weekends and vacation. I had accumulated a modest publication history: a national award for a short story at age 10; a short story and a poem in a children’s print magazine at age 14; two short stories and five literary essays in an online magazine by age 29; an essay in a print anthology at age 30. From my mid-20s to my mid-30s, I had also worked on my craft through several writing courses and workshops at a couple of well-known Midwestern universities and one semester at a low-residency MFA before assorted factors led to my dropping out."
What a ridiculous notion.
- Stephen King, On Writing
Btw, if anybody here is considering creative writing, I HIGHLY recommend reading this book.