"Ten Reasons to Never Be a Writer"

From the time children are very young, people often ask them “What do you want to be when you grow up?” When they are young they often reply with astronauts, firemen and even the occasional President. Personally, I would always say princess but now that seems a bit far fetched. Without helping it, society has created stigmas for certain jobs. Lawyers and doctors are successful choices, while aspiring actors and musicians might not be as successful. Like any other profession, writers have their own stigmas. When I first started responding to that all important question with the response of ‘novelist,’ I got plenty of feedback. Most of it was not positive. That being said, here’s ten reasons I’ve been told I shouldn’t be a writer, but one reason I am one. 

The most common reason is this: writers make a meager income. According to The New York Times in 2017 the average writer made 20,300 dollars a year. That is not even enough to buy a used Toyota. If I was to pursue writing as a full-time career, which would be my dream, I could barely afford the necessities. So forget the whole writer in a coffee shop scene. I would barely be able to afford to leave the house. In order to be a writer, I would have to work several jobs and the stress of that alone would make it impossible to do the thing I love to do, write. 

The second reason: writers are notorious for their bad habits and bad lifestyles. Just take a look at Scott F. Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald rose to fame in 1920 because of his book This Side of Paradise. That was the pinnacle of his career while he was alive. He became a severe alcoholic, and kept reaching for profits that would never exist. He tried to make movies and that was a bust and by 1940 he died of a heart attack. Fitzgerald’s close friend Ernest Hemingway is known to be the “most famous boozy writer of all time.” You may be thinking, “this is only one example, what does this prove?” but there are countless stories of writers and the intense habits they developed in order to finish a deadline. 

The third reason: creative writing can easily be a lonely job. You don’t have any coworkers, besides your editor and publisher, and it is probably difficult that your coworkers' sole job is to criticize your work. If you don’t count the teen that made your overpriced coffee (who probably makes more money than you), the only people you would interact with are those who constantly critique you and of course, your own fictitious characters. 

The fifth reason: being original is incredibly difficult. Let’s be real, almost all young adult books have the same plot. Either the character falls in love, learns who they are, or turns out to be a vampire (what is the deal with vampires these days?). People who dream of being a classic writer like Austen or Dickens, I admit I fall into this category, will most likely never achieve their success. The reason why these authors are classical is because: one, they lived hundreds of years ago and two, almost all modern stories have some sort of inspiration from them. Oh, if only to be like Austen. That would be a dream. 

The sixth reason: no matter how much you edit, nor how much time you spend on your work, there will always be someone who dislikes it. It could be a critic in a news article, or some random comment online about how your work was [insert insulting adjective]. You can’t please everyone with your writing, even when you go through the grueling process of publishing it. Writing a good book can take years, even decades, and it can take less than a minute for someone to say they didn’t like it. 

The seventh reason: in fictional writing, if you can’t write you're out of the job. Writer's block is all too common, and when it hits, your only source of income has gone out the window. Say goodbye to that 20,000 dollars. I would love to say I can write all the time but that's just not true. Stress from life can make it impossible to focus on your writing. Even as a college student, I have trouble writing after a stressful day. This would be even more magnified if writing was my only job, and I would be constantly trying to force my way through writer's block. Attempting to create material while I have writer's block is incredibly difficult and normally the stories are less than mediocre. 

The eighth reason: you could spend ten years on your work and then realize it’s terrible. From experience, I know authors have a connection to their work and obviously have a bias for it. This is why we have editors to make our writing better. But the truth is, you could spend countless hours of blood, sweat and tears on a piece only for it to be barely average. Writing is a difficult profession because you're not just writing something you will like, but something other people will like too. 

The ninth reason: Selling copies of books is incredibly difficult. There are the classics to compete with. Not to mention every other writer out there. There is a high chance your writing will have a similar plot, style, ect. to someone else’s. If you end up getting your book sold at Barnes and Noble, you will have to compete with all the other hundreds of books on that shelf. It seems almost impossible to sell many copies of your work

And finally, the tenth reason, and the hard cold truth: when you become famous as a writer, it usually means you're dead. Yes, writers can find wealth and success when they are alive, but oftentimes, when authors are dead their work becomes much more popular than when they were alive. Even classic writers like Emily Dickinson and Edgar Allan Poe only reached the peak of their careers after they had written their last words. As an aspiring writer, this is hard to grasp considering the fact that I am only eighteen. 

So, in conclusion, there are a million reasons why I shouldn’t want to be a writer. Yet, writing makes me feel like the truest version of me that I can be. It's so much easier to explain how you feel through a character opposed to actually stating the emotion bluntly. Writing helped me when the world seemed to be turned on its axis. When I write, it feels like the actual world stops and I can just focus on the world I’m creating. When the world shut down during COVID and no one could leave the house, I was able to go somewhere: my stories. Through my writing, I could be with anyone and be anywhere. I felt freedom when I wrote then, and I still feel that same amount of joy when I write now. I look back and I realize how much those stories helped me. Every morning I would wake up and jump out of bed onto the computer to write the next page. There's a sense of joy in creating characters with personality and literally typing life into them. You begin to know your characters and learn how they react in situations. I always seem to put a part of myself into character, whether it be my brown eyes or my outspokenness. I’ve noticed that my characters often resemble myself or those around me, whether that be a good thing or not. Through my writing, I learn more about myself and how I perceive those around me.

I know that no matter what profession I go into, whether I become an author or not, I will always be a writer, because writing will always be a part of my life. Writing has become a tool I lean on. For as long as I can remember, I’ve created stories in my imagination. Only a couple years ago, I started writing them down. It started with an eleven year old girl writing in a worn out red notebook and even though I still write in that same notebook, I look back at how much I’ve grown as a person through my writing. When I look back at the worlds and people I’ve created, I discover things about myself that I didn’t know at the moment. I can go right back to that moment when I finished. Because no matter what I do in life, nothing will feel as good as writing "The end."