April 17, 2023
Expectations vs Reality, Writer-Style
So, you too want to “become a writer”, right? You’re in good company! You and another 5 billion people apparently want the same. But this, too, is a club where expectations and reality don’t quite match.
Inspiration for this post came when Alicia, a friend of the blog, shared with me a map that shows what is the dream job of people by location. As you have perhaps guessed it, people from Finland to Algeria and from India to Trinidad & Tobago answered that their dream job is writer. Other popular choices were “pilot” and “influencer” or “youtuber”.
As someone who has experience of… one and a half of those professions, I feel it’s important to talk a bit about the “expectations vs reality” factor of our choices.
The key takeaway here is, we are very often attracted to certain activities and we’d like to make money out of them. That we enjoy doing them is precisely the reason why we should never attempt to bring money into the picture – or, in any case, not so before we fully realize the repercussions of such an action.
Writing Expectations vs Reality
I mentioned above that I have experience of one and a half of those professions. I was referring to writer and pilot, but the truth is, I haven’t worked professionally as a pilot, so even the “half” part is misleading. Nonetheless, i) a close relative has worked for an airline for decades; ii) I also know the industry well enough to know what being a professional pilot involves.
The reason I’m bringing it up at all is because the dynamics between being a professional pilot and being a professional writer are, as I see it, very similar when it comes to the divide between expectations vs reality. I suspect such dynamics are similar in many other professional spheres as well, but I can only speak for these two this one and a half, being a pilot and being a writer.
To put it plainly, for most people (and certainly for me when I began), being a professional writer was a simple equation: You write so well that people pay you money to write. But we already need to refer to two caveats.
What Is “Professional Writing”?
The way there are all kinds of pilots – from bush pilots flying floatplanes over endless Canadian wilderness to crews of the 1.2-million-pound A380 carrying hundreds of people across the Atlantic – there are also many kinds of “professional writers”, too.
There are copywriters for [insert disgusting company] and screenwriters for mindless Hollywood hero movies. There are also copywriters for [insert apparently less disgusting charity organization] and screenwriters for independent, artistically intriguing local filmmakers.
Nonetheless, I’m willing to bet that all these people who (according to the not-so-scientific, let’s remember, map) want to be professional writers actually mean they want to be novelists. The expectation vs reality game is present everywhere – that is, it affects copywriters and screenwriters as well – but it’s probably nowhere more surprisingly present than in being a novelist.
And the first such surprise comes from what it takes to become a professional writer.
What Does “Writing Well” Have to Do with Anything?
That’s the second caveat; the second shock a writer eventually (hopefully?) discovers. For me at least it was a shock, if such a word can be used for something that lasted several years.
Writing well means far, far less than what most aspiring writers believe. Marketability is way more important than literary excellence. Which means, though there arguably is a threshold of minimum quality to cross, that is very low. I won’t even mention celebrities who (ghost)write a book as proof, just look at authors such as Paulo Coelho, Patricia Cornwell or Nora Roberts and that’s all you need to know about quality of writing vs marketability.
But we haven’t even scratched the surface of expectations vs reality when it comes to being a professional writer. The far more insidious elements is not what it takes to become one, but what it takes to “remain” one.
The Expectations and Reality of Selling
There is one thing I realized early in my short but revealing professional writing career: Professional writers sell something, but it’s not their books.
Professional authors sell themselves; their persona, their presence, their entity.
Professional authors come as a package with their book(s), and – with very rare exceptions – it’s impossible to separate one from the other. To write a book means to promote it, either the way your publisher tells you (for instance by touring and signing, giving interviews, etc.) or the way you must figure out and execute yourself, if you publish independently.
Most of those 5-or-so billion people who want to become professional writers likely think that it involves more or less typing on a laptop, sending the manuscript forward, and then collecting royalties. Yet their expectations and the reality are separated by too much money, and wherever there’s money involved, things become complicated.
How Close Are Expectations and Reality?
In other words: Does it matter if there is a disconnect between expectations and reality? “I still want to be a professional writer”, some/many/most of those 5 billion people will confidently argue. For some/many/most of them, it might even be true. Some/many/most will also not regret their decision in a hypothetical 5 years down the road.
The thing is, do you want to take that chance?
The question is somewhat moot. You wouldn’t know unless you tried, I suppose. And yet, life experience teaches us that we can learn to anticipate certain things.
I know for a fact I would be miserable if I had to follow the professional writer lifestyle – smiling and nodding to inane journalists and their pointless questions, shaking the money-slimy hands of publishers entirely clueless about true art, hypocritically thanking critics attending some event I was shoved into.
I would be as miserable if I were a professional pilot, since the expectations of my youth (flying planes and getting paid) would be smashed by the reality of what being a professional pilot really involves (literally minutes of hand-flying and mostly following the flight director and the magenta line, plus training, checks, paperwork, and procedures in general, not to mention hierarchies and other peculiarities, or crazy schedules that are stressing).
You, reading this, aren’t me. Maybe you’d still very much like to tour around promoting a book, give interviews, or smile for photo opportunities. Maybe you’d even accept all the compromises having to sell a book means in terms of true art.
The important thing, however, is to know what’s involved before you accept it. The important thing is to be aware of the reality after the expectations.
4 Comments
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I think they get their expectations of what it means to be a novelist from movies.
Movies are NEVER more than a couple of hours long. So it can’t take more than that to write a book, right?
That’s how long it takes me, typically, to settle down and start writing.
They’re also very funny movies – but only if you know where to laugh. Nobody wants to watch novelists do whatever it is we actually do.
Maybe that’s where they get their ideas of what it’s like to be a pilot, too. From cute little child to shooting down bad guys in the skies over (where?) in under three hours. Most of commercial piloting is quite boring driving a big lumbering aircraft full of other people’s overpacked suitcases. Unless you have to suddenly set it down in the Hudson River. For my data, I have had two brothers-in-law who worked for Aeromexico. In Mexico you go to pilot school instead of college, so they were quite young when entrusted with all that expensive machinery. We heard stories from the pilots’ union sometimes.
So either you’re a novelist (pilot) and write, edit, publish, repeat (fly, repeat) – or you’re not. Once you publish one and it’s available for sale to the public (and someone you don’t know buys a copy), you’re a commercial novelist – and the designation never goes away – you can now insist it appear on your tombstone. The professional writer package is an add-on; I’m saving up for it. I could use some nice adulation.
If we believed movies, in the span of a couple of hours you write a book, get rich and famous, then descend into alcoholism and start all over again (*cue motivational 80’s song*) 😀
If the many-worlds interpretation is correct, there might be an alternative universe where there’s a Federico Fellini film showing what it is really like writing a book: as you said, two hours just to settle down, followed by typing-revising-typing-revising for another couple of hours, days of procrastination in agony over authorial decisions, more writing, more revising, more agony, ad nauseam, until one day you give up with a “good enough” and go to sleep 😛
‘in the span of a couple of hours you write a book’ Chillingly close to the chat programs – except I find it hard to believe human readers will like their stories. The ‘books’ written in hours may be published, but even with human intervention, the stories will be trite, repetitious, similar, and clichéd. Some genres will lend themselves to it better, but it’s hard to see the bots producing anything with real emotion in it, because they can’t experience any themselves.
Given that the big publishers want ‘different but more of the same’, I’m curious as to when one will get by their intern/forwards. Children’s book? Romance of some variety, now that there are so many sub-types to look for tropes on?
Some things might work – inexpensive books with your child as the hero already exist, but these might be much more detailed.
We’ll see – and apparently far sooner than we expected.
I’ve actually written a post about it. In a nutshell, I agree with you: Some genres are obviously easy to imitate, and big publishers indeed want more of the same (I wouldn’t even add “different” in there).
At the same time, AI can’t produce art, precisely because art is predicated on divergence, discontinuity, and even aberration. Art is about dissimilarity, whereas marketing is about similarity. AIs are all about ingesting existing information and then regurgitating it back in a form that seems different but is actually the same.
Ultimately, the people who buy again and again the “same” book (written by an actual human) will buy it from an AI and spot no difference. More sophisticated readers will certainly look elsewhere.