About

“Elves and dragons? Cabbages and potatoes are much better for you, Samwise Gamgee.”

– The Gaffer

But not for writers of fiction, am I right, Hamfast?

For some people (Make that a LOT of people), writing is a chore. “Writing” for such people invokes images of school, offices, and drudgery. Essays, business reports, and the like. Writing? Heck no. What kind of lunatic would write for FUN?

May I suggest…Writers?

But what is this mysterious and lofty species? What’s their secret? How can they find it in themselves to create daunting paragraphs and long descriptions, often “because they want to”? Don’t they have something better to do with their time?

These are all queries that would be typical of any non-writer. But, of course, these questions are mysterious to all BUT writers. It’s a fact of nature that people who love to write are not understood by the ones who don’t. To tell the truth, writers of fiction are the ones who peered beyond the dreaded cusp of work, and glimpsed the glory that is writing. They don’t see the path; they see their destination.

Many, MANY people have been scared away from a career in writing fiction because of the work involved. And, as I can tell you, there IS a lot of work that goes into writing. And, most of the time, guess what? You DON’T make the NYT Bestseller List. You DON’T sell a million copies. Very few of us are Charles Dickens and C.S. Lewis.

Here’s the good news: You don’t have to be. In the end, you only need to impress one person: yourself. If you can be your most merciless critic and impress yourself, then you’ve succeeded as a writer. Of course, it would be great to sell a million copies, make tons of money, and be famous.

But, the hard truth lives: It probably won’t happen. This final fact will shatter all but the truest of writers. The thought of publishing a work and having no one read it (Or worse, have everyone hate it) decimates some writers. They throw their promising talents in the trash, off to take up petroleum engineering, teaching math, or to work at McDonalds. And that’s the sad truth: There honestly isn’t as big of a audience for written works of fiction as there was, say, one hundred and fifty years ago. Yesterday’s books are today’s movies, and today’s books are tomorrow’s unread dime novels.

And yet, after all this, writers have survived. True, we’ve suffered a bit, but we’ve lived to tell the tale (Pun intended…Har har). As stunning as it may be, there are still people out there who will spend who-knows-how-many hours of their busy life and put more than 40,000 words on paper to tell you a story about elves, wizards, dragons, marines, aliens, or human beings. How can it be, with so many other outlets of leisure, that so much work can be put into a book that probably WON’T put bread on the author’s table?

The answer is in the question.

The truth is that writers LOVE to write. Sure, they like being rich and famous, like any other person, but unlike any other person, they love to write. They love to create worlds and watch them die. They love to raise up empires and then bring them low. They create characters, watch them grow, and let them perish. Writers create a universe and appoint themselves sole arbiter of life and death over it. There is no greater feeling of accomplishment than to create your own reality. For writers, it’s not about the money, the fame, or the glory. It’s about their passion for writing.

There’s more than a few of us, too. There’s plenty of fledgling writers out there who have a secret 10,000 word Google doc pet project. If you’re one of them–or even WANT to be–You’re in luck. This blog is for you. Now, I’m no expert–Even the most experienced writers have just scratched the surface of the art. All the better: it leaves plenty of room for improvement. This blog is for everyone who either published or aspiring authors. And who knows? Maybe you WILL make a buck or two.