More money in writing writing books than writing books

Surfing the net on writing, as I do, I came across this original view from Nora Miller in Salon. The post is quite old but probably even more relevant now as NaNoWriMo has expanded. You can see from the comments that it wasn’t popular.

https://www.salon.com/2010/11/02/nanowrimo/

I think she has a point. I’m not going to stop writing but I think she’s has a point. Clive James opined long ago that the Arts Council people should be paid not to write a novel as there were already far too many. Gore Vidal reckoned that writers now outnumbered readers.

It’s academic, literally. Like politics, writing has turned from something you did after having a bit of real life to something you go into as a career at eighteen. In the good old days, politicians were businessmen or journalists who went into ‘public service’ because they were interested. Writers were scientists, professors or civil servants who did it at night, like Tolkien, C.S. Lewis and E.R. Eddison. Now there are multiple university courses on both politics and writing. This is good for those writers who get jobs teaching to supplement their income. There must be thousands of creative writing courses in American universities and more than a few in England. The ones who can’t get cushy jobs have to write books about writing to supplement their income. In a way, this is daft because they are simply creating more competitors. I confess that I have bought too many writing books. Reading them is much easier than writing and it sort of feels like you’re doing something to make progress. You’re not.

We are drowning in writers but none of us wants to stop.

As for writing, it’s split into two camps, the popular and the literary. The literary types have done their creative writing course and produce dense prose full of imagery and metaphor that wins prizes. No one buys it. The other school is people banging out pulp fiction for the masses and hoping Hollywood will pick up the film rights. Both have their merits but I gladly place myself in the latter camp. For one thing, I don’t write well enough to be in the former. For another, you write what you read and I read pulp. Sorry.

My main problem is that I prefer writing short stories and no one buys them. Oh well.