Being an author...

[advocatus diaboli]

[Bill W]

A dose of reality. 

[Cia]

To sum up ... Writing IS work, work, work! Could someone tell my husband that? Lol

[Sasha Distan]

i disagree with about 90% of that video.

 

Yes - i write on anything i can.

 

I actually wrote my first novel in a place like that, we were on holiday there. there is a community of writers, apparently i am in it. i call it GA and in November, i call it NanoWriMo  at the pub. finishing and self publishing is satisfying as fuck.

 

of course he looks like a shit mess, he's a fucking hipster wanna-be "uh i'm a writer even though i never finish anything". anyone shows up looking that unwashed and trying too hard to fit in it gonna get shot. My friend Morgan came to a meet dressed as a gay Aladdin - just for kicks. i wear my cowboy boots to the pub.

 

no one with a brain uses a typewriter anymore. you'd have to make onion-skin copies... terrifying.

[advocatus diaboli]

I think you're making wildly baseless assumptions, Sasha.

 

"there is a community of writers, apparently i am in it. i call it GA and in November, i call it NanoWriMo"

 

Not everyone will have that. Personally, I choose not to participate in NanoWriMo, so I don't (voluntarily, I do concede) have that community. It goes without saying that not everyone will have GA, fit into GA or be comfortable with GA. Which is fine. In that video, you see a group of 3 and then the main character in the video, alone. Some will have a community they fit into, some won't.

 

"finishing and self publishing is satisfying as fuck"

 

No one said otherwise. The video gave no indication that it wasn't. It skipped that part, so no indicate either way was given. I think this goes without saying, really.

 

"of course he looks like a shit mess, he's a fucking hipster wanna-be"

 

I fail to see what this has to do with anything...

 

"'uh i'm a writer even though i never finish anything'"

 

It never explicitly says he doesn't write anything. On the contrary, it clearly shows him finishing a piece. The fact that working on and finishing a piece of daunting is stated, though. I agree 100% with that. It really is daunting, it's a huge task to undertake, and can be incredibly draining.

 

"anyone shows up looking that unwashed"

 

To an extent that matters, but for authors I think it's more about the quality of your work then if you showered today.

 

"trying too hard to fit in it gonna get shot"

 

I fail to see what this has to do with anything...

 

"no one with a brain uses a typewriter anymore"

 

This is simple association, I think. Many great authors came from a time where they had to use a typewriter, there was no other choice. Some people associate their greatness with the fact that they used a typewriter, so therefore they need to use a typewriter as well, to be great. It's nonsense, of course. Although, if you get a proper typewriter, I see no reason not to use it.

[Thorn Wilde]

I thought that vid was accurate as fuck. That guy there? Me.

 

I always had this idea that when I'd penned my first great novel I would type up the final manuscript on a typewriter before sending it off to a publisher. 

 

FYI, and entirely randomly, Hemingway always wrote with a fountain pen, standing up at a tall desk. He only used a typewriter to type the finished manuscript. So I've been told by a dude whose mentor knew Hemingway personally (also Picasso).

[Sasha Distan]

I think you're making wildly baseless assumptions, Sasha.

 

No, I said that I didn't agree with 90% of the video. I. Me. hell, it may be true for some people. but just because someone else calls that reality doesn't mean it is.

My point really was that a person can chose to live with the fact that their expectations haven't come to anything, or they can bash about and change their life until reality fits better with what they wanted. i wrote and published online for nearly 9 years before i found a community i liked. and i'm more prolific now i have that community.

 

Hell, i may be the exception that proves the rule, but in a set of communities this wide, i seriously doubt that.

 

My comments about the way the dude in the video dressed were all tied up together, don't quote me by taking them out of content.

 

To finish by quoting Amanda Palmer "Stop pretending art is hard"

[thebrinkoftime]

I don't know. I saw this video last week and my reaction was just, "Cute."

 

I mean I don't mind at all, but a whopping 100% of that video doesn't apply to me.

 

I was in the game before I graduated from college. It's not hard to do these days.

 

I both love to eat nasty things while I write and can let the creativity flow without anything. It would have been smarter to point out that people don't realize that even though you may not be using your entire body, writing takes just as much energy as construction work or singing and dancing in a 2-hour concert and thus writers have different ways of dealing with those energy demands.

 

I've used a typewriter before, but in my country the "true writer" writes by pen because penmanship is part of the art, but everyone has to submit to modern practices. *shrugs* It just kind of reminds me that the best comic humor can transcend borders, but a lot of lazy humor tends to come up with the excuse of, "You have to be ______" in order to get it.

 

Speaking of lazy, the working writers thing is the laziest part of the humor -- of course there's a diversity in the way writers look, just like there is for any other job. It doesn't make for a good punch line.

 

Some writers are loners while other prefer to interact with a community? Wow! You don't say? Obvious jokes work better when they're so obvious the way you pretend they're not is the ridiculous part.

 

The first draft getting bank vs. confusing and needs work part is probably the only one that is really on the dot with respect to how crazily a writer can build up their self-confidence into over confidence as they write.

 

The next one is confusing though, what writer cliche are they picking from here? I thought the more common perception was of the pretentious Starbucks poet who wears a beret and types away on his laptop? The idea of the writer's workshop as a stationary place began to die as technology made it easier for writers to work away from home, lamps, paper and flat writing surfaces, and I think even the thickest of the thick know this, so the joke completely falls flat.

 

Now I'm not a fan of self-publishing at all, but that comparison between the writer's quaint bungalow and the poor guy writing in his car kind of misses the point completely. If you surveyed the living conditions of what are considered the greatest writers of all time, you'd get a lot of people writing in absolutely horrible conditions and getting slammed by the peers of their day. So...what is this? For maximum funny one would think you'd work backwards -- writing would allow you to purge your demons, instead your demons come and purge you.

 

The last one isn't particularly offensive, it's just kind of "eh" because for the humor to work it has to invalidate the first part of the comparison and realizing that once you've been successful you have to do it again if you want to eat doesn't invalidate anything. In my experience it tends to give you strength, you think, "I did it once, I can do it again!"

 

But it's all good, because the video ends with a nice and very true message that applies to every writer and one gets the feeling the point is to encourage people who are disillusioned about their career choice.

 

It's kind of like a video about one popular conception of writing vs. another one. The reason they are both popular conceptions is that they both happen with alarming frequency. A lot of authors (good or bad) do have successful careers after they graduate and just as many get stuck in a rut. So on and so forth. The problem with the video's humor is that while I'm sure it's amusing to people who have no idea what writing is like and to the people who can relate, writers have such varied lives it's hard to make a video that would apply as a stereotype, because they've all but disappeared over the last century or so. If they wanted to go for accuracy, they might have had more luck with a video that compared the image of our idealized intellectuals like Hemingway and Woolf, and their actual lives.

 

But it's Buzzfeed. I mean, this isn't the New Yorker or even Cracked. It's drive-in humor -- you get something quick and easy, but the quality of your food and the accuracy of your order is not guaranteed. I will maintain until the day I die that floppy, greasy, salty fries are my idea of gourmet desserts.

Edited August 20, 2013 by thebrinkoftime