It's a Weird Time to Be a Writer
Why would you want to do something silly like write fiction, especially now?
It’s a weird time to want to be a writer. On the one hand, you have a thousand different ways to distribute your work, many of them free or extremely low cost. The author who wishes to indie publish has many options, and traditional publishing, though rapidly changing, is still strong. People actually bought more books in 2024 than 2023. On the other hand, you have TikTok, and Netflix, and Hulu, and Apple TV, and Xboxes, and a day job and the collapse of the American social trust system and the twenty four hour news cycle and a likely economic recession to compete with. Compared to that, how do you expect to hold someone’s attention for 100,000 words, let alone 5,000 when they can watch a silly video of a marmot martinet?
You clicked that link, didn’t you? (I don’t blame you, @klr_productions is one of my favorite Instagram follows.)
My point is that it’s really hard to get people’s attention these days. And reading a work of fiction requires extended, sustained attention. I mean, half of you reading this have already clicked away, checked your phone, or stopped reading, or didn’t even open this to read. Look, I do it too. I’m not trying to stand up here on a soap box or boast at my amazing powers of concentration. I suffer from the same cognitive deficits living in our current world gives you just by virtue of participating. You have to be crazy to want to write fiction, you have to be crazier to think people will actually read it, and even more insane to think you might ever get paid for it.
I’m going to tell you a story. I doubt it’s true. Some of you may have heard it before. Some of you may have heard a different version. This is the version I heard. Or maybe it’s the version I like to tell. It’s about an aspiring violinist.
A young man wanted to be a professional violinist. His father was friends with a world-renown violinist, and he just happened to be coming to town for a performance. The young man begged his father to introduce him to the violinist, and the father arranged a meeting.
The violinist said to the young man, “Play me something,” and the boy did. Afterwards, the violinist sat there, brooding. Then, after a time, he said, “You’ll never be a professional violinist. You don’t have any talent.”
Crestfallen, the young man went home and never picked up a violin again. Many years later, the boy read an article that revealed the renown violinist had gone deaf. Not only this, but the boy learned the violinist had already been losing his hearing even back when he had that fateful meeting with him. The young man — now an older man himself — wrote the renown violinist an angry letter. He said, “When I was a boy, you told me I didn’t have any talent at the violin. Because of your words, I gave up playing music forever. But you were going deaf then! How could you know I had no talent if you couldn’t hear me well? Maybe I would have grown up to be a wonderful musician!”
A few days later, the violinist responded, “My friend, if you had really wanted to be a violinist, then nothing I could have said would have stopped you. You would have ignored me and done it anyway.”
If you want to write, write. People wrote stories in war trenches while wearing gas masks and they wrote poems in concentration camps and they wrote music as the bombs were falling on their cities. The world is absurd, life is absurd, humanity is absurd. But the only thing that makes sense of that absurdity is art.
Keep writing. Or don’t. But don’t stop just ‘cause there might be no one listening.
Hey folks, I aim to keep this newsletter free, but if you would like to support my work, please buy a copy of my books!
My debut short story collection, Histories Within Us, is out now! The book is available in both ebook and trade paperback at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, and elsewhere.
Also, I just received Advance Reader Copies of my forthcoming novel, Space Trucker Jess about a badass sixteen-year-old grifter who goes on an odyssey across the galaxy to look for her missing father. You can pre-order copies here.
That’s it for now, folks. Hang in there and take care of yourself. This ride is about to get bumpy.
Matt