I gave up on my dream of being a fantasy writer in the middle of undergrad. It was a "great" decision in that computer science became something I was equally passionate about and has been extremely lucrative, but halfway through me twenties, I'm trying to write on the side in order to avoid the late in life regret I'll feel if I don't make an attempt at publishing something.
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.
Only in the traditional publishing world. Readers, especially genre readers on Kindle, do not care about the publisher, agent, or the industry trappings, they only want good stories. The situation is analagous to iphone or steam indie games: if you work hard and are persistent and can overcome the problem of visibility, you can find an audience and make a living. Some make six figures or more just on Kindle.
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.
Yes, it's a gilded cage, but the door is unlocked. It's pretty easy as a software engineer in the Bay Area to take off a few months between jobs, so you can scratch your writing itch during that time. Alternatively, you might be able to work 2-4 years while saving a bunch, and then take a year off to write.
You don't need to primarily rely on writing for income to be considered a writer. Granted, a day job and other commitments usually means it'll take a while to finish anything. But only career writers have to care about quantity.
same but with music here. Just starting to pick it up to 'keep the dream alive' but there's no way I see being a full time composer would make anywhere near my salary in the IT field. Truly a first world problem though, so a lot to be thankful for.
Fortunately for me there are plenty of other musicians around whe want to at least produce some music and publish it. Even if it is at advanced hobby level. Getting ready to release our first four song EP, 80s inspired metal.
Kurt Vonnegut once said that no one should start writing before the age of 40.
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.
I don't have the Vonnegut quote and don't remember him saying this in his semi autobiographical A Man Without A Country (he wrote his first novel at 30), but here's a Bertrand Russel quote on the subject:
“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.”
The idea is to experience a lot of the world as each experience means you’re more likes to have something to say that will be useful, compelling, and captivating to other people.
read the whole thing in context and it might make more sense...basically he's saying don't be a self absorbed a hole and go out into the world and do things
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).
I started a novel ten years ago because I thought I had a bunch of cool science fiction ideas. I never got very far writing it.
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.
Technical writing! Are you an engineer? Do you love writing? Want to work in an environment that is far less stressful, but just as intellectually stimulating? You get to write neat articles, create helpful documentation. You are the first one to play with nifty features. Heck, keep writing small features if you want, or internal tools. You can have a big influence on inter-team communication.
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.
I'm at a transition point in my career and have been really thinking about doing this. Salary and career trajectory are my primary concerns. Do you feel comfortable with your pay and future opportunities? The only portfolio I have is documentation for my GitHub projects. Any advice on building it up if necessary?
Send me an email: public@goodroot.ca with some details, and I will gladly answer any questions and help you however I am able. Goes to any other lurkers as well. :)
What I've seen is that the salary is dramatically lower, and as you noted, the opportunities to advance into management are more more difficult to obtain. (My wife spent time as a technical writer. I work in software engineering.)
Which is almost 20 years after he began writing (according to your link). The point is, he didn't start writing at 45. Not that you're implying that, but I see plenty of pieces about people making it big when they're older, but those same pieces fail to shine as bright a light on the years and years of toiling and craft-honing that led the person to that moment.
TFA is the most extreme example I've seen recently of the sort of piece that inspires absolutely no comments on HN whatsoever, while its title inspires lively discussion of largely unrelated topics.
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.
So awesome to hear about making challenging career changes later in life. I think people can get a bit too settled and may believe that it's impossible to change.
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.
Career change is definitely possible. I’ve done it. I think it takes time and that The key is to not rush it. Make the transition one step at a time, while trying to think ahead, like a chess match.
Most writers who are successfully published later in life seem to have been working at it for years/decades prior. Richard Adams, who published "Watership Down" in his 50s, may be the closest thing to a successful "newbie" who emerged later in life:
> 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”.
Lee Child, author of the Jack Reacher novels, published his first novel at age 43, which he only started writing after being laid off as a television producer.
> Weir began writing science fiction in his twenties and published work on his website for years. He also authored a humour web comic called Casey and Andy[NB 1] featuring fictionalized "mad scientist" versions of himself and his friends (such as writer Jennifer Brozek) from 2001 to 2008; he also briefly worked on another comic called Cheshire Crossing bridging Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan and The Wizard of Oz.[10] The attention these gained him has been attributed as later helping launch his writing career,[11] following the failure to publish his first novel attempt called Theft of Pride. His first work to gain significant attention was "The Egg", a short story that has been adapted into a number of YouTube videos, a one-act play, and is the overarching concept of Everybody, the third album by American rapper Logic.
"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."
There wasn't an entire "boom" generation of banal revolutionary-in-their-minds people in their 50s and 60s hanging around gumming up the works and doing their damnedest to prevent any progress whatsoever. So in that sense life was different for 38- and 40yo people than it is now.
No one alive now would have noticed. We are comparing the life expectancies of the present day to those of 1762. At 38, Kant would have already outlived most of his contemporaries.
People in the 1700's didn't all die in their thirties. Kant lived to 79. As for contemporary philosophers, Leibniz lived to 70, Hume to 65, Rousseau to 66, Adam Smith 67 and Voltaire 83. Average life expectancy was pulled down by infant mortality, but plenty of people lived long lives.
“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. ... If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write.”
- Stephen King, On Writing
Btw, if anybody here is considering creative writing, I HIGHLY recommend reading this book.
Trollope was in his mid-30s when he first published a novel, though one could say that he hit his stride after 40. Quite a few writers have done their best work in middle age or later, you are correct.
Wiped my comment because it was too late too delete. I shouldn't have passed any judgement on this woman at all. I don't need to have an opinion on the internet.
Agreed, and increased connectivity and social media has only exacerbated the problem. People are all too eager to spend too much time measuring themselves against others instead of putting that effort toward introspection and improvement.
I hesrd a good discussion on Joe Rogan about how distance (physical and figurative) enables people to do things that would normally make them feel horrible. Most not sociopaths don’t feel good about insulting another person in person, not to mention there’s a certain danger of getting your ass kicked. The internet enables someone to act like a monster. Pathetic but unfortunately wide spread.
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.