Don't Be a Writer

Good Advice

“You don’t want to be a writer. Trust me, if you can do anything else, do it. Writing is hard. I cannot tell you enough how much you do NOT want to be a writer.”

I’ve heard that same advice at conferences and conventions, in classrooms and chat rooms, in blog posts and in books. Almost every writer’s advice to other writers is to, first and foremost, give up.

While other industries will first tell you all the great things about their line of work, only writers will tell you up front that you’d be better off doing anything else besides writing.

It’s hard work. It takes years to get good at it; it takes even longer to get paid for it. No job will take more out of you. Trust me, you do NOT want to be a writer.

Did I listen?

Of course not. Like most people who choose this path, I thought, “I’m different. I’m going to make it. I’m not afraid of a little hard work.”

Have I ever told you that I’m just not that bright sometimes?

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Not that Great at Listening

So now I’m a writer. I write for money. I write more often for no money. I write for people to read, but more often I feel like I’m writing for myself.

That’s what a writer does. A writer ignores the good advice that tells them to get a real job, to take a steady paycheck, to follow some dream that has some remote possibility of coming true. We quit our day jobs to pursue what we think we’re good at and what we want to get better at. We spend our free time writing thousands of words, most of which never see the light of day, and our working hours writing for others on subjects we might not care about just to pay some bills.

It turns out, they were right. Writing is hard.

As a writer you must constantly generate new content, for your blogs, your articles, your novels. You have to be on the lookout for new ideas, and new spin, sometimes for subjects on which you have already written thousands of words. In the last two months, I have written 41 articles on Blackjack; each one is unique and original. Can I just tell you how tiring it is coming up with new things to say on a subject you exhausted weeks ago?

And you have to write every day.

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Turns Out, Writing Is Hard

Writing well takes a lot of practice. Everyone thinks they can write. They write emails at work. They send each other text messages and chat online. They think writing is just an extension of that.

It is so much more. Writing well takes drafts, revisions, editing, rewriting, and then maybe scrapping it all and starting again from scratch. A single blog post may take a few hours as the writer figures out that a first draft is often rambling and without direction and requires a lot of revision. I’ve done three drafts on this post, and it’s only going to be read by a handful of my friends (if they even make it this far!).

I’m still struggling with learning how to write well. Every day I discover an article I’ve written where the words lack flow, where the thoughts stumble or fail to develop fully, where the syntax is laughable.

Every day I ask myself what demon possessed me and made me think that I could possibly be a writer. That damned muse won’t leave me alone.

So to you, I offer this advice. If you want to be a writer, don’t do it. Writing is hard. I cannot tell you how much you do NOT want to be a writer.