How the fuck do fiction writers make a living?

How the fuck do fiction writers make a living?

Making coffee.

/thread

Be prolific. Even if only half of your work is any good you'll build up a loyal base. Eventually publishers stop rejecting your work.

Being prolific requires you to be prolifically published

that photo is comfy af, op

In the era of self-publishing that's not as big an obstacle as it used to be. Everybody has a website and rudimentary understanding of social media these days, it's just a matter of finding and manipulating your niche.

Side jobs to finance their potential writing career. Plenty start off in reporting and journalism to write and get paid as well.

Get a job that pays the bills but also doesn't require a lot of thought, leaving you free to think about your writing at work. It also has to give you sufficient free time to actually write.

Or, alternately, you could just do what Faulkner did and bum around doing odd jobs and living extremely cheaply.

Write for television.

It would be next to impossible to live the way now that Faulkner did while he was in New Orleans.

A thousand times this.

Win the pop culture lottery like Rowling, or be smart and get a good job and treat writing as a hobby that may provide passive income.

Get into an MFA program with a paid assistantship, teach some shitty college composition course, and write your ass off for 3 years. Try to make a portfolio and publish what you write in that time. If you gain some traction then be an adjunct and make even less than you did with your assistantship. You'll likely have to go on food stamps unless you teach in a city with a cheap cost of living while you schlep your shit between three different college campuses every day to teach the same basic composition class five times per day.

You do this for as long as you can bear it or until you have a writing career (spoiler: you won't) and then you get a job in marketing or tending bar or some shit and give up your dreams.

>tfw every faggot and his grandmother wants $1200 a month just to live in his garage in my country

I just want to write.

this sounds like great fun

Get a customs inspector gig.

>Poverty
>Comfy

How sad that you have never felt true comf

that apartment probably costs a lot due to location but it's far from luxurious and not exactly comfy, how the hell are you supposed to masturbate with those huge windows?

>comfy
>in the heart of the "machine world"
fuck that

>folksy faggot from the sticks

why don't u take it to a trump forum or something ok bubba

Truly comf living in the country still requires you to not be in poverty.

The truly beautiful natural places of the world do not welcome hobos and drifters.

i bet if you lived there you could go weeks or even months without seeing a black guy, unless you ordered something from ups or whatever

Bar tending

It's one of the best jobs a writer can have. You literally have people telling you interesting stories all night and then you get to publish them and pass them off as yours.

Half of the stories in my first collection of short stories I published were drunk tales told to me from across the bar I worked behind.

I never advocated for poverty, user