_refugee_ this could get its own topic but since I apparently communicate with this site exclusively through Pubski I'll just throw it in here. Alright, but is fanfiction worth it or not tho. And yes, before y'all type it up, I know I spent a sizable chunk of my sophomore year shitting out a 10,000+ story about a bunch of people online, but I also knew that it was garbage, and you knew it was garbage, and everyone knew that because it wasn't edited and really didn't have a plot of any sort and blahblahblah. But if you are a person who considers themselves a "writer"^TM, does your perception of fanfiction change? Can you write "serious fanfiction," or is fanfiction by definition impossible to be taken seriously? Is every moment you spend writing in someone else's universe a waste of time because you should be crafting your own? Or is all writing good writing as long as you're writing because it's practice? Granted besides referenced word vomit I've not written fanfiction since. Now I write word vomit of my own creation. The mediocrity is the same, but without the added sour aftertaste of "wtf Harry Potter wouldn't say that shit." Whether that's a win or not depends, I'm guessing.
I know I spent a sizable chunk of my sophomore year shitting out a 10,000+ story about a bunch of people online, but I also knew that it was garbage, and you knew it was garbage, and everyone knew that because it wasn't edited and really didn't have a plot of any sort and blahblahblah.
even so, you amused a bunch of people a great deal and gained loyalty and respect. I suppose in the grand scheme of things that's not much. ... or arguably in the grand scheme of things that is all that really matters as we stumble in our own ways in the direction of goodness.
Did you get the Rider-Waite deck? I was just explaining to someone how the 22 cards of the major arcana depict the allegorical journey of a human in a Jungian sense. I love that interpretation. I can send you the book where I pulled that out of. I just saw it on www.abebooks.com for $1.22 + shipping. Are you at that Smokey address in Aurora?
It's on it's way to Smoky. Estimated Delivery Date: September 26, 2016 Title: The Tarot Author: Alfred Douglas, David Sheridan Quantity: 1 I decided to go for "very good condition" - Mine has the spine broken and pages falling out. Sewed up periodically by shoemaker's elves. Although who knows where anything is anymore, given my sudden eviction from the island. Still, it's amazing how long one can journey with only carry-on. Book Description: The Tarot This book is in very good condition and will be shipped within 24 hours of ordering. The cover may have some limited signs of wear but the pages are clean, intact and the spine remains undamaged. This book has clearly been well maintained and looked after thus far. Money back guarantee if you are not satisfied. Book Price: US$ 3.78 Shipping Price: US$ 1.64
I've got a friend who is a seriously successful fanfic author, and we have had this exact conversation. And it is circular. You cannot (by definition) make money writing fanfic. So it is ultimately pointless. Becoming a better writer is only done by writing. Writing fanfic is writing. Return to 1: repeat. There is no "right" answer, of course. But it is an important question to ask yourself from time to time. "Am I spending my time on the right things?" The right things are, reading, writing, and creating. Sometimes you will be doing 80% of one thing (writing) and only 20% of another (reading). You can't sustain that, so you need to make sure to measure yourself, ask "Am I doing the right thing right now?", and then do The Right Thing, whatever it is. I've got Discworld fanfic I have written. It really is a great story about Nobby Nobbs accidentally becoming a legitimate businessman. But... what do I do with it? Good questions to ask yourself. Just don't stop asking these kinds of questions, and you will be healthy.
Hm. Maybe...? But... I'm almost 48 years old. I can't ever "retire" in the normal sense. So my only option is to find work that I love to do, and do that until I keel over. At this point in my life, the "point" (as you put it) is to develop a career that allows me to make money doing something I love. So, in my case, you could say that the point is whether the thing I like to do generates money or not...
I understand your point, but I think you are missing mine. a) I do make my living from writing. b) I enjoy my work. These two things are not a happy accident. They are the result of concerted focus on a specific goal to make money by doing something I love.
At first, I wanted to say, "You are very lucky," because while I love to write, I have come to feel that a career in writing is out of my personal reach. However, I am certain that you have managed to make this happen for you out of skill, perseverance, practice, all on top of some undeniable, but unquantifiable, element of "right place, right time" which might be classified as "luck." (As you yourself say above this.) I'm glad that you have managed to make it work for you, and of course, a little envious. I'd love to hear what kind of writing exactly you do and how you make it pay (article writing? magazine editing? freelancing? fiction books? kindle books? a little bit of everything? do you write only on spec? how long have you been writing/publishing? etc), because I am passionate about and interested in writing. I am greatly interested. But - with that in mind - I am pretty sure such a career is beyond me, and my kind of writing. I said what I said because as an amateur, I have to enjoy writing in order to push at even what little success I've achieved - and I have had to push hard, and I've burnt out a few times along the way. So to me it's important to do things because you love them, not because you achieve success at them. Because if I was doing it for material success I should just stop right now. I don't know, I feel like I'm talking about a circle in very thin slices and maybe, it all sounds the same to anybody else.
I totally got that, and that is exactly why I responded in the way I did. I was an amateur once, too. What I saw in your phrasing was a base assumption that it was silly to think that you could ever do what you loved and make money at it, and I wanted to be a counterpoint to that way of thinking. Anyway, the way I did it was through Marketing. I learned how to market things, how to do marketing writing, etc. You get $20 for this article. And then $50 for that one. And then do a package of three on the same topic for $75. Etc. After a while, someone will like your work. Then they will send you more work. And they will ask you to write other things. "Hey, I know you normally write blog articles for us, but do you think you could do ______?" Yes. Yes, I can! Because writing is writing. It's all stories. There is a goal to be achieved at the end of the article, and there are facts that need to be presented in a coherent order to tell a good story, and you need to not stab your eyes out with a fork when you write it, so you throw in some artistry in the sentence and story structure, and... $500. Then you get offered a $10k, 6-week contract, working on a product launch for a high tech company that needs you in their office, 8 hours a day, developing "content" for their web site, marketing sheets, booth materials, etc. You have just made HALF your annual income in 6 weeks. Anyway. Now I write sales proposals for a tech-ish company. Some organization needs to buy a product that does X, and they put all the details into a thing called an "RFP", and send it out to potential providers. I read it. I figure out if we can do it. I research their company, their use case, our products, what we can do, what we can't do... and then I write a 50-100 page document that tells the story of how amazing these products are and why the customer wants to buy ours. That work hits a lot of my "loves": technology, research, writing, storytelling, etc. Then for fun, I have a bunch of freelance work I do in the evenings. Writing articles, customer case studies, blog posts, editing other people's work, etc. Small things - transcripts, article editing, etc - I get $100 a piece for. I have one client that can send me 4 of these in a week, and they each take me about an hour to do. Sometimes I can do four of them in an hour. Larger Case Studies I get $500 each for. Two or three a month. These can take 1-5 hours each. My day job pays me very well. (Actual amount redacted because it felt weird to write such a big number.) I have two books in the works, one fanfic story, a TV series, and two other screenplays I work on to keep my creative juices flowing and to scratch the creative writing itch. So yeah. I get paid to write, and make a good living at it. It took me 10 years of concerted effort to make it happen, but I did it. The whole reason I go into all of this is because I don't want you to sell your dreams short. There are lots of people like me. But we don't talk about it in public. We just say, "I'm a writer." It feels weird to talk openly about this... there's kind of this unwritten rule that we writers don't really talk about the money end of things. But. Now ya have it. I said what I said because as an amateur...
I would say most of it is awful but it's such a weird, prolonged experiment in collaborative storytelling that it borders on sublime human creative achievement. I'm exaggerating a little but I'm massively interested in a world where there's a canon explanation for Stan Lee forgetting the Hulk's name one time. There is absolutely nothing else like the DC and Marvel universes in all of fiction.
The transition is actually at the My Little Pony/Watchmen crossover. Just kidding, that's not real. Just fuckin' kidding about kidding, it's totally real.
So here's the thing, I've never written fan fiction, but some of it I've enjoyed the hell out of (HPMOR). I think sometimes it is very freeing and worthwhile to spew out garbage. Sometimes you find out when you look at it later it really isn't all as garbage as you thought it was, and that maybe like 25% of it is good enough you'd want to keep it and rework it. I am absolutely a defender and supporter and participator in garbage writing. I call it "vomiting on the page."