Fiction Writer: More Laborious Than Labor

Introduction
The hardest job in the world. If you’re not ready for that, if you think writing is just a leisurely activity and you can make it a profession and not have to work, you’re dead wrong, and you should prepare yourself for struggle. First: the act of writing, alone, is extremely complicated. To come up with a story is not necessarily a hard thing to do, sometimes it comes to you in total completion, but figuring out the best way to tell that story is almost impossible. And then, when you have completed this impossible task, you must read the thing ad infinitum, making changes, deleting this or that and adding here and there. Finally you get a good result, and the happiness is explosive. Unfortunately, now it’s time to publish: get ready for one rejection after another, a repeated kick in your pants until you are convinced that you are a hack, and you’re brought to the brink of suicide. Finally, if you’re lucky, you find a publisher, and they introduce you to an editor, and they tear your stuff apart all over again, and you have to fight them tooth and nail. Then it’s published, and you start all over again.

Job Function
The process of writing is torture: absolute, wretched torture. If you are not, for some masochistic purpose, compelled to do it, then refrain from it at all costs. That being said, finishing something good is a pleasure beyond all comprehension, and you will begin to search this feeling out like a junky searches out that first high. Lifestyle
Agony.

Additional Information
If all you can do is write, if all you want to do is write, then who am I to dissuade you? I know this affliction of yours very well, and there is nothing that is going to stop you, especially the words of some unknown author, who perhaps thinks he is much more talented than he really is. If you think being a writer will be fun, you don’t know what it means to be a writer. Of course, there are trash novelists…that might actually be fun, just filling in the details of a formula; I wouldn’t do it, but I’m not going to get on my literary high-horse and say that it shouldn’t be done: it’s a viable way to make a living, and probably has very little of that laborious anguish that I keep bringing up.