pg. 84:

"Many references have been made in this book to 'the reader,' who has been much in the news. It is now necessary to warn you that your concern for the reader must be pure: you must sympathize with the reader's plight (most readers are in trouble about half the time) but never seek to know the reader's wants. Your whole duty as a writer is to please and satisfy yourself, and the true writer always plays to an audience of one. Start sniffing the air, or glancing at the Trend Machine, and you are as good as dead, although you may make a nice living."

***

I often think that a nice living would be nice. How likely is it that a beginning writer will eventually have both? That they will become a "true writer," and make a nice living? What would that kind of success require of the writer?

I honestly believe the trick is hard work and finding your own voice. There is always a market for your voice, even though it may not be the market you expect.

Write what you know. Find your own style and use it. Imitation is a poor way to make a living and gives no satisfaction.

Just my $.02

For me, I can't see myself doing anything else, so I will give writing my all and in the end hope that some form of success comes out of it.

I think it's good to find your own style, but I see nothing wrong with imitating other writers styles; actually I can't see how you cant imitate other writers styles. Just from the book I read I know some of my style comes from them, but it has been manipulated into my style, if you follow me.

If you're concerned with making a living, then become an accountant. I think that's the only sane route to go. Some of the best writers aren't very popular at all; Gene Wolfe, for example, held a full-time job while he wrote on the side. But if you try to be popular, you might want to start rolling the chicken bones trying to divinize what the next wave of popular fiction will be. Good luck.

I do think you can say, "I like to write and I'd like to make some extra money, so I'm gonna write popular/commerical fiction." I don't think there's anything wrong with that. Dickens, Twain, Maugham, Dostovesky, Trollope -- they all wrote for money. But they didn't whore themselves out, either, and I think there's a difference -- and the difference, I think, lies in how you let your vision of the world come through your stories. It's all right to decide to write, say, fantasy because it's a hot market right now (though it may not be by the time your novel is published), but it would be a moral fault then to blindly imitate the big fantasy novels out there today, as if you were doing nothing more than writing-by-number. As OSC says in one of his essays in "Uncle Orson's Writing Class," it takes quite a bit of discipline and skill to craft a commerical novel. The key is balancing "writing for the market" and "staying true to yourself."

Here's a personal example. I started working on a novel about a haunted church. I struggled with it for almost a year, on and off, before putting it away. Just a few hours ago (I'm not kidding) I realized, out of the blue, that the reason the novel hadn't worked was because I was supressing my own religious ideas and convictions for fear that "it wouldn't sell." If I ever write it (and I'm thinking about trying it again, starting tonight), I'm going to write it they way I want. Maybe it won't see b/c of the over religious themes, but it certainly won't sell without them. I found that I don't read Stephen King b/c he writes about zombies and vampires; I read Stephen King b/c I like Stephen King. It's amazing just how personal fiction really is.

Well, that't was a mouthful.

Something close to the one you give for basketball, if not worse.

I do remember hearing that the average yearly income of writers, including all best-sellers like Stephen King in the calculation, comes out to about $4000, but that was a few years ago.

When you consider how much best-sellers make and how many of them you hear about, that average implies a huge number of people calling themselves writers who barely make anything at all.