Does anyone here actually aspire to be a writer, or do you prefer basking in daydreams

Does anyone here actually aspire to be a writer, or do you prefer basking in daydreams

Writing is about all I have. Suck at math which rules out the sciences. I'm not musically inclined. So yeah that's about it, I hope to write for the Vidya games, because I enjoyed writing DnD campaigns.

good luck user

What a handsome man, who is it?

Hank Green

I'm too busy studying and working out to write

I do love reading though

I'm not confident enough to write, I feel like I need to read a lot more before I even attempt it seriously.
I do like to write little poems when I'm drunk though.

I'd rather be an editor and shit on all the over the inflated egos of writers instead.

My day job is academic editing. I work out the day-to-day frustrations by writing. I've published journalism, short stories and poems. I had a short story in a magazine in June, and have another one and a poem coming out in anthologies later this year. Feels good.

i aspire not to kill myself

i bet it does

I want to be a writer, sort of. I want to be more of an essayist but I don't write down a lot of stuff because I am worried it'll be shit. I am also worried I'll just end up copying what other people have said and nothing I do will be original or interesting.

I have stopped writing in my journal because a) my life is boring and b) what does it matter? I have no interesting insights to share with other people because the only things I really do are cook, play video games, and read. I don't work, I don't go out, and I don't have a life. There is pretty much nothing worth putting in a journal.

My daydreams never disappoint so there's that.

Too close

It's odd when I see a nigga boast about his failure

Where can I read it my friend?

I want to have written something, but I don't want to write, because I am lazy and incompetent.
Similar situation with the gym, dieting, dating. I want to have the consequences of these, but fuck actually doing the work required.

everyone I know who wants to be a writer isn't a reader so I honestly don't know what they expect

hollywood has perpetuated this tortured artist stereotype that probably once had some validity but now is too much a cliche. this idea that you need to be poor or a drunk or abused or lonely or depressed to be successful in creating art is just played upon by the self pitying and doesn't really have any real merit

Pretty much where I'm at. I'm not well read enough to consider novel writing yet, do enjoy screenwriting though.

In order to be a good artist, you must invest all of your time and effort into your craft.
This leaves you lonely, poor and bitter, often depressed and abusing substances to keep yourself from quitting on life.

So yes, the great writer is a tortured artist, because the process of becoming a great artist is one of torturing yourself.
If people think they can just randomly suffer and the art will come, they are of course retarded.

In order to be a great artist, one has to simply be a great artist. There's nothing to learn.

I want to write. It's one of the things that I know I really want to do.

I live in the Philippines. I don't know how I'll publish it. But I'll still write.

If I am not mistaken, Cormac McCarthy has proclaimed that he doesn't read too many novels. I remember him saying that he hasn't read a novel for a long time.

It's sad how few people on Veeky Forums have actually lived. I mean really lived. There are so many aspiring writers here who haven't even left their own country, or have only left it to holiday with family in their youth. There are people here who have not experienced a series of tumultuous relationships, people who have not hitchhiked for hundreds of miles in whatever direction suits them best that moment, people who have not found themselves drinking hard liquor with a gang of strangers at 2am in a city they can't even remember the name of. Me? I've done all these things. I've traveled the lonesome highways, caught trains and buses and sat shivering and damp in the passenger seats of cars belonging to people who told me more about life than the lonely and callow narcissists on this board ever have. I've gazed lovingly into the eyes of women who taught me the ineffable secrets of their mysterious sex. I've worked more jobs I can remember and learned more skills than I will ever need. I have made friends and enemies from coast to coast and experienced more emotional peaks and valleys than most people here can even comprehend. How can you guys even call yourselves writers when you haven't even mastered the world about which you are intending to write? How can you expect anybody to take your writing seriously when you have experienced barely more than a child afraid of what lies beyond the boundaries of his comfortable little world? My writing flows with an assurance that reflects my own internal state. The dialogue I write is representative of the parlance of the man on the street, not the child in the abstract universe you have concocted to compensate for the fact that the world outside your window terrifies and confuses you. When I write a profound sentence I do it knowing I will be understood and admired not only by the academic whiling away a quiet afternoon in his armchair, but also for the orphaned young man working sixty hours a week as a knuckle-puller in a Sheboygan abattoir. And all this at the age of nineteen, my literary life almost entirely ahead of me, several USBs hanging from my keychain full of stories that would no-doubt make the pale and sheltered suburbanites that browse this board gasp in incredulity. Next month I move to New York to begin a degree in English Literature, focusing on creative writing. The professor phoned me as soon as he had read my application to ask that I choose his university (it's one of the best in the country, why wouldn't I?) with the promise that he will personally guide me over the next three years, or however long it's going to take for me to get my first book out there. Have you lived Veeky Forums? I mean, really lived?

Borges lived a mundane life.

I'm trying to get published, but it's hard as hell to get a platform started, not to mention no literary agents seem to respond to shit ever.

The least they could do is send a damn rejection letter already, 12 weeks is too fucking long.

Would just contact publishing houses, but it seems silly to do that AND try and get an agent.

>I'm a girl and within seconds of meeting a guy my age I can tell whether or not he has traveled and whether, consequently, he is someone I want to spend my time with. I meet a guy, he's quiet, reserved, he stutters and stumbles over basic sentences. He doesn't smile, he laughs politely and rarely, he wears clothes that are either too tight or too baggy and which look as if they were picked from a thrifstore clothesrack by his mother back in 2008. When I ask a question his answers come in "yes" and "no"s, when I begin talking about a subject he has expressed (mild) interest in he simply agrees with what I say and smiles the way a small child does when praised by his aunts at Christmas. In short this guy is not a traveler. Instead of venturing out in the world, instead of asserting his will and demanding that the world yield to whatever demands he may have, instead of turns inward, his will is inverted, he would prefer to plummet than ascend. Rather than reach overcome his anxieties and mental peculiarities through empathy and conversation, he allows them to entirely dominate his perspective and disposition, to make themselves so much at home in his distorted psychology that the disorders and peculiarities and paranoid distortions themselves eventually become the essential substance of his character. I'd buy him a train ticket myself if I thought he had the courage to use it.

I want to write books, but I don't really enjoy writing. Can find the time to do so, I've written some short stories but they were all erotica and I got bored setting up the plot.

everyone here is just daydreaming. if people actually wrote you would be seeing people post about rejection letters and shit all the time. a girl I have on Facebook who wants to be a writer posts one like every month .

tom green

There's nothing that I feel I need to communicate to the world, so writing isn't something that enters my mind in general. I'm just here for reading tbqhwyfamalama.

Which John Green book is this from?

This is my life. Daydreams and lit are always better than spending tons of effort trying to improve just to maybe become mediocre.

Tony Hawk

You're retarded for assuming everyone here is as much of an attention whore as she is. Or that everyone here acts like some basic cunt on Facebook.

Don't be fooled, folks. This is fresh pasta

Hey Faggots,
My name is John, and I hate every single one of you . . .

Writing novels Is the only thing I can imagine doing long term. Tried couple blue and white collar jobs before and the formulaic nature began killing me from the inside after two-three months.

A very faggy and long winded way to say "writers need life experience"

Besides, your story sounds typical American, devoid of actual hardships. Shivering and damp in the passenger seats? Big fucking deal. Hitchhiking knowing you got a place to return and supplies? Come one.

Why am I even replying to pasta.

I have both. I write academically and have published several articles and 2 chapters in different books. I have published 2 chapbooks of poetry and hope to place some essays in online journals. Even without the external validations, I still write, though obviously I'm happy to place something somewhere.

If one could live as an essayist/journalist with a family in tow, I'd drop the academic racket pretty quickly. I don't suffer from the crisis of confidence that many on /lit seem to with regard to their own writing. I know that much of what I write is shite, but some is good. Regardless, publishing is a game depending on whim and chance... so I'll roll the dice.

i am already a writer--a writer of shitposts, and business is good.

I write a bunch of crap but I have no intention for anyone to read it, let alone be known for it.

You seriously haven't even gotten rejections? How are you querying them?

The thing about writing these days is that it's largely a lazy pursuit.

While you're trying to come up with a bunch of words to put on an MS Word document, there are people pursuing other activities that involve a much more rigorous application of humanities *and* STEM. For example, to make your own *good* video game (>lmao video games) with all the assets, you need to be a competent writer, musician, artist, programmer, and mathematician.

Sitting around trying to cook up sentences to string together is hasn't-even-started-the-real-work tier. Understanding several subjects enough to create a multimedia experience is infinitely more impressive. Stop being an entry level faggot already, and just finish your book in like three days. Realize it's not a big deal in the 21st century and writing a novel should not take you a long time, it's literally just words on paper my dude. You need to be skilled at like 5 different things to be a truly self-actualized person, so spending ALL your time on this dream of writing is plebeian college student juvenalia.

some people aspire to be more than a prolific hobbyist.

you can produce a decent novel at a reasonable pace without writing commercial trash ya know, nobody said you automatically have to spend several years writing one piece for it to be good.

I wanna be a good writer and a good reader. I'm neither right now. I could probably become a good reader with time. I can't make myself a talented writer though. Talent seems to be something one is born with, so if it turns out that I completely lack talent I may just give up.

0/10 b8

Probably a /v/ /a/ or /tv/ plebgot. Literally has shit for brains if sincere.

>you need to be a competent writer, musician, artist, programmer, and mathematician.
Which is very, very, very rare. Hence people delegate these parts to professionals if their budget allows it. Vidya story telling is laughed at partially because some devs thought they can do it all.

Besides if novels are just words of paper, games are just code on a hard drive.

yes, hobbyists can make some decent stuff. I never said they couldn't. some smart and talented hobbyists can even make a livable wage.

but there's a unique sense of accomplishment attached to dedicating yourself to one single narrow pursuit. it's a feel that nobody who hasn't done it would understand.

even the dumbest idiot would get to a point where they see things in the craft that hobbyist intellectuals don't---IF they dedicated themselves completely to one individual thing.

the one thing Veeky Forums doesn't get is that talent is maybe 20% of the game. education, another 20%. but the majority it boils down to how much of your life you commit to it.

take any pleb off the street and force them to write for eight hours a day, every day, for ten years straight, and read good lit the rest of the time. literally nothing else. by the end they'll be far beyond any "talented" scrub with an MFA from an elite school.

>prefer basking in daydreams

Even if that's true, the fact that you needed to make this post reflects more poorly on yourself than me.

I made the post because I had a genuine idea to share. You made your post to express a temper tantrum, adding zero value to the conversation. You literally just posted "me no like ur dumb post". So congratulations, you're literally worse than a shit-for-brains by your own logic.

Talented people don't waste their time on MFA, which is the antithesis of talent and closer to your pleb forcing example.

>Which is very, very, very rare.
Truth. Most gamedevs haven't even read GR. Freaking plebs.

>Which is very, very, very rare.

Fair enough, it really depends on the scope of the project. Somebody like Pixel for example (dev of Cave Story) is an exception, but still no slouch compared to the "singularly focused artist" meme.

Why should I believe this idea that spending more time on something makes you better? This implies that all people are blank slates.

>waaaaaaaaah user was mean to me!
Sorry guy, but if you say something retarded you'll be treated like a retard. Your ideas are shit and this isn't a setting where they'll be validated just for existing.

>john blow
>allegedly some elite game pro patrician
>constantly shits on everyone about how they can't into maths and their games have no artistic value
>proceeds to take several years to make 1) a shitty platformer that could have been an adobe flash browser game and in fact probably already existed in flash in some incarnation, and 2) a gay cereal box puzzle game with pretentious quotes to trick peasants into thinking it's deep

I hear you talking John, but where's the beef?

The singularly focused artists are the ones who shape the entire craft in case of success though. Do you think Mozart, Bach and Beethoven could write music that is still relevant if they spent their time perfecting other wildly unrelated skills?

The vidya that has any hope of remaining relevant for our culture in the next decade and centuries (should be a very small list either way) usually had huge teams and was still years in the making.

I engage in savage self criticism before even writing down a single letter so nothing ever gets done.

>perfecting other wildly unrelated skills?

The mistake here is assuming such skills are automatically unrelated to writing. A person who was a lawyer for the first 1/3 of life and then becomes a novelist has their own subjective experience to relate, and need not spend their entire life as some kind of bohemian literati. Literature is enriched by various perspectives, and it would be even more dull if literally every book was written from the cosmopolitan MFA faggot's worldview. Again, not all people are blank slates: devoting all of your time to literature does not automatically mean you will produce quality works.

No one here even likes MFAs or thinks they're worthwhile. What cesspit did you crawl out from and when are you going back there?

The cesspool where I can think outside of memes. It's literally irrelevant what people here think to my point, I didn't attach Veeky Forums memes to my post while making it. It was just normal English.

Perspective and experiences aren't skills. Besides, a lawyer is a lot closer to a writer than say a programmer or mathematician and some of the skills needed interwind.

>devoting all of your time to literature does not automatically mean you will produce quality works.
Obviously. Doubt anybody who understands literature would suggest so; but it does need time and there are only so many skills and experience one person can obtain during their life, so focusing their efforts on one thing (without fully disregarding others) sounds like the most promising way to have the chance that this one thing will be actually good.

You are a meme though. All your posts show that you're the prototypical faggot who thinks they're an expert on something because they read or watched some random shit online.

>so focusing their efforts on one thing (without fully disregarding others) sounds like the most promising way to have the chance that this one thing will be actually good.

I do not understand why you believe this to be the case. Were the great novelists of the past dedicated 100% to writing? What qualifies your statement?

The fact that you're a shitposting faggot literally just posting insults automatically makes you worse than even the dumbest genre poster.

"Hurr ur dumb I'm smarter than u."

Well based on your posts I don't believe you. Get some self awareness. Shoo fly, go spam somewhere else.

You forgot to mention that I'm gonna design the first good programming language.

[posts on twitter about how everyone in my programming language live stream is dumb for asking syntax questions]

: ^ )

>Were the great novelists of the past dedicated 100% to writing?
While not 100%, I am sure it's harder to count the guys who really excelled at one thing instead of guys who shitted out novels, symphonies and architecture projects while coming up with cures for diseases and solutions for astrophysical problems. Besides, given how our knowledge in each subject went deeper with time, things that were possible, won't be anymore.

Also how did you even make the jump from "focusing" to "100% dedication". Somebody living shut off from society writing 16h every day for decades is unlikely to amount too much.

I'm trying to be a writer. I'd actually like to a be a genuinely great writer, someone people would read centuries from now.

I've gotten lots of nonfiction published, mostly magazine articles and paid blog posts, and in the last year I've gotten three short stories published. It took a lot of work and being ignored, but I may be on my way.

This desu

There are many different crafts I have wanted to master over the course of my life.

I have barely attempted a single one.

Writing is my fall back. No matter how old I get or how shitty my living circumstances become, I can always dream of making it big as a writer.

>fly
You do realize this metaphor would make you a piece of shit, right?

Good Lord are you retarded.

As meme-tier as this is, it's important that writers experience life. You can write about your imagined scenario of what love is like, or you can experience the crushing disappointments and insecurities you are made to witness in a real relationship and then delve into it through your writing from that perspective. It's a world of difference.

>It's a world of difference.
Sure but reading about actual relationships is pretty dull, so the fantasy version is still preferable. Just like nobody wants to read about actual crime investigators but the interesting fantasy.

One should be able to pull off both without personal experience given enough research.

Everyone lives and it's an experience. You understood that it was a pasta but didn't understand why it was so dumb. There's no real metric for what counts as life experience and what doesn't. Even reducing it to a checklist of shit society/the media say you should do by a certain age or to live a fulfilling life is reductive.

Via email, like they tell you to on their "submission requirement" page.

I've always wanted to be a writer. I keep starting novels and never getting anywhere. My problem is my mind is constantly full of separate vivid ideas for themes and characters and events but I can't get it together to string together the most basic plot, so I just write disjointed passages and chapters. I also tend to hate what I've written because it isn't detailed enough so I go off and read a ton of reference material, that gets me interested in something else and the whole cycle starts again. Drives me up the fucking wall desu, I'd give anything to just sit down and get something done even if it turned out bad in the end.

Jake Blue

Thanks..

You can't really write for vidya

Why not?

Yeah but how do you format them? You have to be doing something really basic wrong to not even have gotten one rejection or reply of any sort by now. Unless you just sent it to one or two people.

Well, I sent it to two group agencies that are supposed to share it between each other

I did technically get one reply, but that was the guy telling me there was a miscommunication and that he didn't publish my kind of novels. It's honestly hard enough trying to find individual agents who publish the kind of shit you try to write, but this is just infuriating.

And I actually learned how to format the letter from some website and one of those agencies submission guidelines, so I guess it's possible I fucked up at some point in a minor way, but not in anything that'd make it unrepliable.

You're supposed to take a spray and pray sort of approach and just hope something sticks. I mean, obviously don't send something inspired by /pol/ or whatever to some cunt who talks about how much she loves diversity and feminism, but yeah, it's all about volume and so long as it's at least in the ballpark genre-wise in terms of what they say they represent, you should send them a query.

I got that, but it's damn hard to find agents at all.

Not like people post who their agents are 90% of the time or some shit.

This is pretty much me. I get an idea that I'm excited about, write a couple pages, then destroy it in a fit of self-loathing

Tyrone Purple

how much do you make for poem publications?

The journal is a tool for yourself. It's an externalized product of your own life that you can use to calibrate your own memory and stories, and learn from yourself in the future.

If you want to write about yourself for others, I believe that's called an autobiography.

I write porn sometimes. And by that I mean maybe 6 pieces a year.
I've been working on a porn text game. And by that I mean I got past chargen and stopped there, like a week ago.

polish? Would you rate my prose if i post it?

>no slouch compared to the "singularly focused artist" meme
He is, though. A significant degree of Cave Story's perceived merit comes solely from the "wow" factor of it being made by one dude. Pixel is outclassed by serious professionals in every category except maybe game design.

Nah, sorry, I just know a polish guy and made a few things like that for him a while ago.

Does anybody else while reading a good book, not only wishing you've written it, but also pretending that you actually have written it and daydreaming about your parents reading it?

Or is that just me?

daydreams.

I really like my daydreams and I want to write them out so that I can hopefully entertain others with these stories I've invented. It would be amazing if I eventually got published and people liked my writing enough to want to pay money for it, and I could live off of this, but I would be immensily happy to just post my things online for free and people actually enjoyed it.

I am a professional copywriter for a marketing agency. I write poetry on the side for giggles. I have a degree in writing. I don't know...all I do is write, but most days I still don't feel like a "writer." I don't know if that makes sense.

Because by the time all the producers, directors and basically everyone else gets their hands on your work, it's but a shell of what it once was.

Same user, I also found out now is a shitty time to look for agents anyway.

Am I just supposed to just sit and twiddle my thumbs until this shitty month passes?