Any writers?

[Undertow]

Um, because I need money to live and write the next book? They don't get that. I didn't learn my craft by writing part-time at night. I wrote and rewrote on the average of six days per week for the last eight years. For the last two years, I've lived on savings just so I could get the novel finished and have one under my belt. It's a damn long hard process, and with the savings gone, I need a publisher to say, 'Here's fifty grand. Write the next one.' Yeah, I want to be successful. Maybe not wildly successful, but enough to let me do what I love for a living.

God, that's good to hear! I mean really, I'd slap you on the back and buy you a drink if I could.

I can't tell you how many times I've either been ridiculed or, at the very least, winked at by someone who says, "You're a smart young man, why are you so lazy that you can't get a better job?" I've tried extremely hard to balance money with writing, and as a result I've suffered on both fronts. I work somewhere I dislike (read hate), doing a menial task, making little more than middle wages just in order that I have the freedom to take an entire weekend and write; or to show up to work with only 2 hours of sleep after editing a chapter; or to take a few days off during the week no questions in order to wrap up a charachter profile.

I could care less if I'm the worst writer that's walked this Earth; I have a passion for the stuff and working a menial office job doesn't equal out to a career in my eyes. I'd rather be writing!

 

[LizzieMaine]

As silly as this seems, you could ABSOLUTELY turn this in to a graphic novel series, followed by an animated series and finally topped off by a trilogy of films. Hey, if Hellboy can do it, why in the world couldn't Band of Suckers? lol Or Code Red: Project Nightwing?

Ingoreious Basterds.

 

[PistolPete1969]

I've been writing on & off for about 15-20 years, mostly for my own amusement. My writings run the gamut from my version of hard-bitten detective pulp fiction to semi-autobiographical erotica. None has ever been published and I have never made a dime off of any of it, but it is a blast to do and "someday" I will finish something & get it published.


Pete

 

[AmateisGal]

I work somewhere I dislike (read hate), doing a menial task, making little more than middle wages just in order that I have the freedom to take an entire weekend and write; or to show up to work with only 2 hours of sleep after editing a chapter; or to take a few days off during the week no questions in order to wrap up a charachter profile.

I could care less if I'm the worst writer that's walked this Earth; I have a passion for the stuff and working a menial office job doesn't equal out to a career in my eyes. I'd rather be writing!

I hear ya. I'm at an office job (cubicle hell) right now and though I do a lot of copyediting/proofreading, the writing bit is only occasional - newsletter articles, etc. And the hardest part of it all? The subject matter bores me to pieces.

 

[Undertow]

Ingoreious Basterds.

lol

Skintalkers or Windwalkers; Flags of Our Feasters; Vampires from Iwo Jima; The Desert Tooth: The Story of Vlad the Impaler.

To name but a few.

 

[Undertow]

I hear ya. I'm at an office job (cubicle hell) right now and though I do a lot of copyediting/proofreading, the writing bit is only occasional - newsletter articles, etc. And the hardest part of it all? The subject matter bores me to pieces.

Yeah, similar situation. A few people know I write, so they come to me with their newsletter ideas, or meeting agendas and I feel like crying.

I feel like that bird from the Flinstones, "It's a living."

 

[Pompidou]

As silly as this seems, you could ABSOLUTELY turn this in to a graphic novel series, followed by an animated series and finally topped off by a trilogy of films. Hey, if Hellboy can do it, why in the world couldn't Band of Suckers? lol Or Code Red: Project Nightwing?

If Frank Miller wrote the graphic novel, and Zack Snyder adapted it for a screenplay and directed it, I think I would enjoy it. It would absolutely have to be in the over the top noir of a Frank Miller work, and only Zack Snyder can turn them into great movies. On a side note, maybe the Russians were so effective in holding off the Germans because they had already created an army of zombies. There aren't many plots that can't be made better by putting zombies in them.

 

[Harp]

Although once I made £13 writing other peoples creative writing english coursework for them at school - they all got A*!

I was caught doing this at university, since the Vietnam GI Bill paid so little.
Adjust, adapt, and make the terrain work to your advantage...

 

[Fletch]

I'm not much on fiction - all I can write is dialogue. I have little feel for character and none for action or plot.

I've done factual writing and editing, though, and I agree with what the others have said - it's rarely a good living unless you're willing to absorb the frustration of people who can't express themselves, or don't have the time, and who don't always value your contributions.

Good writing is necessary to business, but it is a necessary evil to business people. Even when you do your work well, you can become a liability the minute costs get tight.

 

[Chas]

Trying to get something going(fiction). It's pretty dark.

 

[AmateisGal]

You know what I miss? Short story magazines that aren't literary. For example, all the pulp magazines of the 30s, 40s, and onwards. What great stories! I'm not into the literary stuff - I don't write that way and never have (though there are some TERRIFIC literary writers out there...I'm just not one of 'em!).

The women's magazines used to run a TON of short stories and serials. I really wish that would make a comeback. Heck, if I had the money, I would start up a print magazine with stories set from, say, 1929 through 1960 or so.

I think it could be great fun. I've toyed with the idea of doing it online, but despite the explosion of Kindle readers and e-books, I really would rather it be a print magazine (which, of course, equals more expense).

Sigh. Just a pipe dream right now.

 

[Undertow]

You know, I'm not very good a genre fiction - I'm more literary. My stories seem to ramble and go nowhere, but all the while in the background text, something is brewing. And in the end, I try to leave the reader both shocked and satisfied.

 

[LizzieMaine]

The women's magazines used to run a TON of short stories and serials. I really wish that would make a comeback. Heck, if I had the money, I would start up a print magazine with stories set from, say, 1929 through 1960 or so.

The Saturday Evening Post from about 1900 to 1950 is a real bonanza for fans of the short story -- you had people like Fitzgerald, before they were adopted and fawned over by the literati, you had people like Octavus Roy Cohen, who wrote comic dialect fiction, you had P. G. Wodehouse -- many of the Jeeves stories were first published there -- and you had mystery novelists like Earl Derr Biggers. All that weekly, for a nickel. And the stuff that didn't make it into the Post was snapped up by Colliers or Liberty. To break into "the slicks" was the dream of every working writer.

We have a New England-oriented magazine called "Yankee," which, when I was growing up, published really good fiction in every issue -- not gloomy pretentious highbrow stuff, but solid, well-crafted fiction in all sorts of different styles, the common thread being a connection of some sort to New England life. This was when the magazine was edited for actual New Englanders -- but in the '90s, it was sold to someone who turned it into an "upscale lifestyle" rag for transplants, and the fiction was the first to go. It hasn't been worth reading since.

 

[lframe]

While I don't write period, I am a writer. Children's books. I have pondered and outlined a few period pieces for children, but not sure if they would sell. There has been somewhat of a renaissance for our beloved books from childhood about 8 years ago.

However, the cynic in me is coming out. If I wrote a children's vampire book for mid-level, older readers, it would sell in a heartbeat. *sigh*

 

[lframe]

The Saturday Evening Post from about 1900 to 1950 is a real bonanza for fans of the short story -- you had people like Fitzgerald, before they were adopted and fawned over by the literati, you had people like Octavus Roy Cohen, who wrote comic dialect fiction, you had P. G. Wodehouse -- many of the Jeeves stories were first published there -- and you had mystery novelists like Earl Derr Biggers. All that weekly, for a nickel. And the stuff that didn't make it into the Post was snapped up by Colliers or Liberty. To break into "the slicks" was the dream of every working writer.

We have a New England-oriented magazine called "Yankee," which, when I was growing up, published really good fiction in every issue -- not gloomy pretentious highbrow stuff, but solid, well-crafted fiction in all sorts of different styles, the common thread being a connection of some sort to New England life. This was when the magazine was edited for actual New Englanders -- but in the '90s, it was sold to someone who turned it into an "upscale lifestyle" rag for transplants, and the fiction was the first to go. It hasn't been worth reading since.

I'm a Southerner and used to subscribe to Yankee for it's fiction! You are right, not worth reading now and I haven't had a subscription in probably 15 years.

 

[Pompidou]

While I don't write period, I am a writer. Children's books. I have pondered and outlined a few period pieces for children, but not sure if they would sell. There has been somewhat of a renaissance for our beloved books from childhood about 8 years ago.

However, the cynic in me is coming out. If I wrote a children's vampire book for mid-level, older readers, it would sell in a heartbeat. *sigh*

You should try. Failing sucks, but doubt is worse. One day, you're going to be 100 years old, in your final days, looking back on your life. You don't want to wonder what you could've been, so try everything while you can. That's how I do things. Why don't you write one copy of the books you have in mind, and take them to a classroom or two for a market analysis of sorts? Not only will you know whether or not you're on to something, but you'll learn what parts work and what parts don't. Then you can home in on something amazing.

 

[AmateisGal]

While I don't write period, I am a writer. Children's books. I have pondered and outlined a few period pieces for children, but not sure if they would sell. There has been somewhat of a renaissance for our beloved books from childhood about 8 years ago.

However, the cynic in me is coming out. If I wrote a children's vampire book for mid-level, older readers, it would sell in a heartbeat. *sigh*

Don't worry about what will sell. Write what YOU want to write. I think there is a big push in the U.S. for a return to the "good old days" - so I think you should DEFINITELY start writing your books!

 

[Undertow]

Do any of you writers ever find yourself suffocated by a project, so you take a week or two (or in my case a few months) away from it? What do you do to get back in the swing?

Here's my example: I usually try not to read anything that I think would influence my current projects, but from time to time, I need to set my project down and get my bearings realigned.

For instance, I've been writing a novel for a few years now and I've just crested the hill (halfway done). I should be having NO troubles on the downward spill, right? Ha! I don't know where I misplaced it, but I seem to have lost my motivation. This happens, and I tend to move on to something else until I can successfully resume where I left off. But I really want to be done with this novel, and so I've started reading Three Men In a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog!) because I think the spirit of the book is akin to mine. So far, so good.

Do any of you have little tricks like this?

 

[Pompidou]

I'm always taking breaks from what I write. If you stop looking at what you're doing for long enough, you can come back to it with the eyes of a proofreader/editor. Things don't always sound as good when viewed from fresh eyes.

I think my biggest problem when writing, be it a story or a song, is fear of plagiarism. I'm plagued by a near constant sense of deja vu when I do anything creative. Did I come up with this idea, or did I read/hear it years ago and store it to memory? It's a shame there's not an idea originality verification system. Sometimes I'll google search a particular passage of mine, but for song melodies at least, fear of plagiarism is really hard to remedy. I'm not in this for the money, by any means. It's the fear of the accusation, out of pride, that matters.

 

[AmateisGal]

Do any of you writers ever find yourself suffocated by a project, so you take a week or two (or in my case a few months) away from it? What do you do to get back in the swing?

Here's my example: I usually try not to read anything that I think would influence my current projects, but from time to time, I need to set my project down and get my bearings realigned.

For instance, I've been writing a novel for a few years now and I've just crested the hill (halfway done). I should be having NO troubles on the downward spill, right? Ha! I don't know where I misplaced it, but I seem to have lost my motivation. This happens, and I tend to move on to something else until I can successfully resume where I left off. But I really want to be done with this novel, and so I've started reading Three Men In a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog!) because I think the spirit of the book is akin to mine. So far, so good.

Do any of you have little tricks like this?

This just happened to me. I was going along all gangbusters and then WHAM. Self-doubt crept in and I thought, what in the HECK am I trying to do here? I had to step back and take some time off, which was really hard to do. But I just felt frozen. I wanted to write, but couldn't seem to.

Oddly enough, perhaps part of my problem was NOT reading anything fiction-wise. I tend to like to read books that put me in the time period I'm writing in (WW2) so I grabbed Daniel Silva's The Unlikely Spy. It's helped to get me back "into" that time period. I also do a lot better by watching classic WW2 movies as well as just classic movies from the time period. I pick up some great dialogue that way.

But I also journal a lot during this time. I try to get to the heart of why I can't write and what's going on in my psyche that may be preventing me from it. Sometimes, it's as simple as I've forgotten the main conflict between the characters. Other times it's much harder - the demons of self-doubt and "I'll never be as good as (insert author here)" which is pretty deadly to a writer's fragile self-esteem.

I'm working on my fourth novel right now, and after having completed the other three, I find that this is a process I go through with each novel. That's frustrating because I really don't WANT it to be part of my writing process. I'm not sure how to avoid it, though.