On Writing - Practical Things

Rather a generic title for a post, but the simplest things in life are the best. Incidentally, writing is also pretty cool, too.

Michelle and I are writers of the decidedly amateur persuasion. The problem with being an amateur writer is that you can never be sure when you graduate from being amateur to being "professional", or some other word with a similar meaning, like "freelance," "self-employed," and "full-time," all of which are thinly veiled titles for the same general meaning: poor. In the words of Donald Miller, author of Blue Like Jazz and Through Painted Deserts:

"Writers don't make any money at all. We make about a dollar. It is terrible. But then again we don't work either. We sit around in our underwear until noon then go downstairs and make coffee, fry some eggs, read the paper, read part of a book, smell the book, wonder if perhaps we ourselves should work on our book, smell the book again, throw the book across the room because we are quite jealous that any other person wrote a book, feel terribly guilty about throwing the schmuck's book across the room because we secretly wonder if God in heaven noticed our evil jealousy, or worse, our laziness. We then lie across the couch facedown and mumble to God to forgive us because we are secretly afraid He is going to dry up all our words because we envied another man's stupid words. And for this, as I said, we are paid a dollar. We are worth so much more."

I have the feeling that this will become more true to me with every passing year. I want to end up having writing be a big part of my life, and hopefully a part of my livelihood, and as far as I've heard, the first step to supporting yourself with your writing is accepting that you're going to face rejection first and then crippling poorness because no one ever pays you what your writing's worth (well, it may not be worth anything at all, but the time and labour you spent on it is hopefully pretty valuable).

I probably shouldn't start talking about writing on such a dismal note, but probably the purpose of this post was to build up to this, a post by John Scalzi, who's a science fiction author and has a blog filled with delightfully scathing messages to the bigoted, unwashed masses of people who have nothing better to do than sit around reading blogs that do nothing but intellectually punish them. Don't worry though, he's pretty nice, interesting, and helpful most of the time. And he does book reviews too. But the best thing about his blog is that in it, he talks about writing in an honest, say-it-how-it-is manner that sometimes hurts. But it hurts so good.

It's like midnight. Michelle's in the process of having a birthday/costume party, and since the caffeine and sugar is beginning to flow like the promised land, it's probably time for me to go to bed and think about how at least I can get a full night's sleep, suckers. We went to Skies tonight. It was totally awesome. But I'm tired now so I'm going to hit the sack. My next post is going to be about NaNoWriMo, methinks. Unless something extraordinary happens, like a fourteen-year-old girl dressed up as Robin bursting into my room at 3 in the morning, yelling something about holy bedclothes, and running back out. Then I would be inclined to write about that.

-Amy