ya poss tlarn

again, preach it

(i am sort of only just shaking off The Novel myself and I feel frustrated with myself for losing so much time by being so attached to the idea for so long)

Thank you for posting this

I wanted to thank you for your Deliberately Inflammatory Post actually, because just yesterday I was complaining about how I am not REALLY a writer because I have never written anything longer than 5,000 words. but here's the thing: (a) I am a hobbyist? any writing I do is perfectly "real" because I never have to sell it to anyone in order to live; and (b) I actually have always enjoyed short stories and novellas more than novels, so why should I hold myself to a higher standard than the work of authors I enjoy? lol! lmao even.

anyway great post and thanks for writing it (and this follow-up)

The phenomenon of encouraging the next generation to become some trophy occupation is not limited to just writing, I'm afraid, and that's where I was headed too before realizing I really didn't need much to enjoy life to begin with.

I’m glad you’re here.

it was a good post and so is this one. i like the novel as a form (i am spiritually a nineteenth century loser in an attic) but being able to be analytical about WHY i like it is the actually useful thing, as is engaging with other forms, as is confronting the profit-driven reasons that we focus so much on it. so, yes, and thank you

gotta get a little inflammatory to spit hot fire

good post. the inflammatory one was also good.

One thing I think is interesting is that sites like Archive of Our Own and Fanfiction.net have the potential to encourage a healthier, more do-able form of distributing written fiction: posting one chapter at a time of stories of variable length with no enforced schedule.

Kind of similar to submitting short stories or chapters to monthly magazines.

It's a shame that there's no "New York Times Bestseller" equivalent of respect or sustainable career you can easily make off of digitally distributing chapters at your own pace like that. Or if there is, it doesn't have the same allure as something like "bestselling novelist."

Hi, I’m a former creative writing major that burned out hard, and while I was lucky enough to have a professor who didn’t push novels this hard (thank goodness for community colleges,) both your posts really helped me disentangle my own mindset about writing, that I can just enjoy and find value in putting out ideas in shortform, that writing doesn’t have to be days and weeks and months wracking my brain and crushing myself to put out the “right” kind of story.

You helped me find the joy in all this again- thank you 💖

It also taught me that the cultural figment of The Artist is something I should distrust.

I'm also glad you've got your insulin, thanks for these posts

Excellent post, nothing more needs to be said

Hi, another creative writing major here that burned out hard trying to work the indie novel hustle in the late 2010s. The thing is, I don’t regret writing the novels themselves, it’s trying to sell them. It almost killed my love of writing all together. I realized a couple of things doing it: the market is incredibly over saturated, and the best way to make money with indie fiction is to sell books on how to write indie fiction. I’m not too proud to say I have a few $5 ebooks on the subject.

But the thing about hitting rock bottom was that it allowed me to figure out what I want. I was never going to be a professional novelist, in no small part because I didn’t have the Twitter following for it, RIP. I’m writing for me now, putting what I make up on Itch for pay what you want. If someone buys something, cool, if they download for free, also cool. I’m just happy to make up stories about the people that live in my head.

Also, on the AO3 thing, some of the most satisfaction I had writing in the last 4 years was writing short stories and short story collections for an obscure little fandom, just to be telling stories. I learned more in that time about what’s important about writing than a lot of what I learned in college. Ironically, novel writing was still considered a viable career when I got out of college. Two years later Amazon would open its kindle store to indie writers. We never learned about that in class.

So maybe I’m not entirely on team Fuck the Novel, but I am there, grizzled old man, to tell the Youths that there’s no money in that old abandoned mine. Hasn’t been money in novels for years. Best look elsewhere, I say, and when they look back I’m gone.

It's...conflicting, I guess? I totally see what you mean, and I'll admit it is a little vindicating hearing someone say this after consistently feeling frustrated with the overwhelm of novel writing--like, I always have a vivid collection of scenes for a given project living in my head when I start, but oops you have to do a bunch of setup and descriptions of people walking instead of the thing you actually want to write. I think what I have to say next might be a bit of a copout, but I think I just don't have very much interest in learning the mechanics of alternative form, nor do I completely feel like short fiction would be well suited to my tendency towards longer, ambitious plotlines. So, I don't know, I'll figure it out. I hope I don't end up like your friends, much as there's a very real threat of it right now.

Yeah I love short story anthologies more often than anything else I read and write short stories most often myself and always felt kind of bad about not really reading novels too often, but after reading this I feel more okay about that.

Didn’t read the first post but I really loved that nail you hit home in the second post. Thx

I stand in my position as Senior Developer, looking from my childhood dreams of making video games to the state of the video game industry and back to my discarded dreams again. I left that dream behind, and it hurts that I did, but it hurts more to know that my life would be worse if I didn't. So I turn back to my SQL and my .NET and accept the unfulfilling stability.