What if I Wrote & Nobody Bought?

Yes, don’t make the same mistake again.
Use your existing Windows machine and download the free trial of the excellent Windows version of Scrivener.

Play for 30 days.

If you like it, you can buy the Win version.

Then go spend some time playing with a Mac in a shop. If you’re convinced about both the writing thing and the Mac OS thing, then you can drop the cash.

Alternatively, buy a MacBook Pro 13" with Retina screen. USe the options online to up the specs to the best of everything (which will cost you about GBP 2,300) and then buy Scrivener for Mac.
If you end up not liking it, you can always just package it up and send it in the post to me.

To some degree I suppose it is what you are writing about, but even the dry text of legalese, which may not permit too much creativity regarding content, lends itself to gaining experience in writing clearly and simply so others will understand. I find that my writing, which is rarely for sale as such, but sometimes gets published, forces me to think clearly, to express myself so that others will understand a difficult concept, or to understand my point of view. In other words, it is an exercise, an exercise which is transferable to other venues, such as formal talks, just talking with friends, or in thinking about problems. So, while this is a bit tangential to your initial question, don’t worry so much about getting ‘sold’; do it for the fun of it. If it does get sold, so much the better.

As regards Mac or Windows: with respect to Scrivener, the Mac version is head and shoulders better than the Windows one. I have both and only use the Windows when I have to.

Don

Let Nike be your guide: Just Do It.

Fret about it, and the quality of the work will fall. Wake up and apply yourself with a song in your heart, and the quality will rise. Be Confident.

And Enjoy It. Your enjoyment will shine through.

Oh, and Read - which you can of course now do on your MBP. Good writers read tons.

Moved to the “And Now For That Latte” forum, as the “Feedback” forum is for feedback specific to Scrivener. Feel free to post about anything you like in the “And Now…” forum, though!

I too am retired. Before that, I was fortunate to have spent a considerable amount of time involved in aviation in some of the seedier parts of the world. That left me with an abundance of encounters, lies and whispers that might have led to treachery at the time, but have subsequently enabled me to “write what I know.” Yes, it’s a cliché.

From those humbling experiences, I began to write short novels and short stories. The more I write about what I know, the more I find myself able to make stuff up outside of the things I know. Nobody buys them, but that hasn’t stopped me from using Smashwords to distribute to a wide variety of ebook sites. Only recently, I began uploading to Amazon as well. (Well, all right, truth be told, I’ve earned about a hundred bucks, but who’s counting?)

Was it easy to get started? No. Did I know what I was doing? No. Did taking a creative writing class help with that? Absolutely not - at least, not for me. What did put some semblance of order into my otherwise confused writing life was learning about outlining and planning. I know too that I’ll be continuing to learn and practice the craft until the day I finally expire.

Doing such may not be for everyone, but it allowed me to get pointed in the right direction. Now, I can sit and come up with all kinds of shi-, err, ideas. I use a notebook to keep from forgetting them. I “type them down” when the story lines begin to come together.

Is it easy? No. Is it work? No, not for me. It’s only fun. Do I care if anyone buys the cheap trash that I write? Of course not, otherwise I wouldn’t be doing it.

I don’t anticipate becoming a best-seller by any stretch of the imagination. I do anticipate whiling away my years sitting in a room lit by sunlight whilst churning out lies, tall tales and miscellaneous banter based on smidgens of truth, encounters and geography I’ve experienced over the years.

Come summer, to add to the experiences because I can, I throw a leg over my motorcycle and find new material as an independent in the world of bikers.

JFDI - Just Freaking Do It.

Yeah, this. My experience is more in music, but if you don’t handle rejection well, the creative fields aren’t for you. (I’m talking in general, not just anyone in this post.) Mel Powell, the composer, once said he could easily wallpaper his house with all the rejections he had received. Morton Feldman (another composer) said that he never read reviews, but if it was good, he got 3 copies. For every piece I’ve had on a concert, I’ve had at least 3-4 rejections.

And those rejections come early. The very first piece I wrote was called “crude and unsophisticated” by my high school orchestra teacher. Dude said I’d never make it to grad school in composition, and I proved him wrong. (Charles Wuorinen–American composer–once said that composers need to write about 35 years’ worth of shit before they write something good.) I can’t remember all the people who said I was wasting my time learning to compose.

And, believe me, it does sting. The people on the committee for calls for scores only probably listened to the first four seconds of a piece you slaved over. A lot of the time with competitions, they know who the people are (even with anonymous submissions) and are gunning for their friends/colleagues. You don’t really stand much of a chance in that environment.

But somehow you find a reason to fire up the computer one more time for one more piece, and out it comes. You write (music/words) because you NEED to write. You produce stuff because you know you’ve got what it takes, you love doing it, and you can’t possibly imagine yourself doing anything else. The thought of packing it in and quitting is more painful than the newest form letter you received from Yet Another New Music Group.

And I’d throw a caution into the suggestion of freelancing. Granted, I was just doing copy work for SEO types of things, but it can be every bit as soul-sucking as any 9-5 job. While I’m grateful for it keeping the wolves from our door, the loss of something I do for fun (prose writing) put me into a patch of burnout I’m still recovering from. (I write prose to keep me creatively limber, as it were, since I don’t have a head trip about it being my chosen field.) I also have a chaotic neutral streak, and being told what and how to write a passage isn’t something I handle very well. (Which is also why I wouldn’t last doing film scoring.)

Nobody will buy it. Almost nobody. Stephen King probably gets about 0.05% of the literate English-speaking population.

Nobody reading your stuff is passive rejection. People reading your stuff and saying it’s no damn good is active rejection.

It’s a question of how you respond. I had a stinker of a rejection from some chap this afternoon. Until then, like the rest of the world, I really respected him. Now, I realise he’s an arsehole with the taste of a Pleistocene football hooligan. “Screw YOU, pal,” I hissed as I fired up Scrivener to blow the sucker to smithereens. Oh, he’ll end up in the gutter, a broken man scrabbling for leavings outside the Groucho Club where once he held court. The phony. Etc etc etc.

Doing this for money is a scramble and it’s getting tougher by the week. Nobody – publishers, authors, agents, even readers – knows quite what to do. OP: you have a pension; the wolf is kept from the door; if you’ve got the thousand in your hand, buy your dream rig and enjoy yourself. You’ll be doing what writers have done for the last 2,500 years: writing to amuse yourself and put on the dog in front of your pals. The last 150 years of the commercialisation of literature – in the broadest sense – will, I think, be seen by our posterity as a bit of a blip. Write like Hesiod, Aeschylus, Juvenal, Pliny, Donne, Herbert and all the rest: for the hell of it.

When it’s you and your keyboard, no man’s your master. Enjoy it.

Tablet time Master Michael
Fluff

Or you can refuse to be a part of this tragic downturn. Be truculent way beyond the point of what is reasonable, and demand fair pair for a day’s work.

F$@#^ Pliny, be Patterson*!

• • hell, the man isn’t an author anymore, he’s a genre.

One other piece of advice. If a creative-writing expert should visit a city near you to speak, sign up and go along. Writing for the screen or for the page - it won’t matter - so long as he or she promises to deal with structure, plot and characters - with stories, in other words - and is reputable, that will be all you’ll need.

You may or may not actually learn much (or at least much more than you’d learn from the books the guru may have written), but you’ll come out feeling a lot better about writing, and even about yourself, and, after all, in learning writing as in learning many activities, gaining confidence is 90 per cent of the struggle.

Of those I’ve attended, I recommend Robert McKee, not because he’s the most celebrated, or because he tells you much more than he does in his book Story, or even because over the course of the seminar you’ll meet quite a few people like you just starting out, and one or two experienced and back for a refresher, but because the whole experience is pretty interesting. And if you’re like attendees I’ve met, you’ll come out feeling as if you’re a Master of the Writing Universe.

Bit like refusing to be part of this mortality lark, eh, Fender, old Pig?

Demand the fair day’s pay from whom? Who decides what’s fair? And what if they say “Sod off”? Withdraw labour? WGA did that. Really changed the game in Hollywood. Screenwriters’ usual contract used to be two drafts and a polish, but now… NOW… (cue throbbing MUSIC… it’s one draft and be off with you, churl. (Throws tattered bone) And that’s only because I like you, schmuck!

There is bound to be an economic shift in any business where more people will produce the stuff for free than for the “fair day’s pay”. What’s changed is the methods of distribution and exchange, and if that sounds a bit familiarly Marxian, so be it.

@Fluff: The Domperidone gag (ha) is fine but I wasn’t feeling sick; merely realistic. To talk about writing without noticing that the entire financial basis of it as a profession is radically changing seems irresponsible. My point, to the OP, was that people have always written hoping to be read; but the period in which they’ve written hoping - perfectly reasonably - to be paid is, I suspect, a blip. If I had to put money on it, I’d say that in 30 years there’ll be Pattersons and there’ll be amateurs. Probably the amateurs will be doing the good stuff and the Pattersons will be very rich, but that’s not without precedent…

You mean like the music, film, and software industries?

Young Master Michael, I was only pulling your…oops! nearly said a rude word, not unlike the kind of foul language my human uses. Sorry.

As Doctor Johnson said, “no man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.” A bit glib and gruff and Dr.J-curmudgeonly, but then that was his schtick.

But now it’s getting ever harder to write for money, or at least enough money to justify the effort needed to actually write. The magazine I edit pays the same for a feature now as it did when it started in 1975. Adjusted for inflation, we pay a quarter what we paid in 1975. Which is better than some of our competitors, which pay two-thirds of what they paid in 1975 before inflation.

Why can’t we pay more? I keep asking the beancounters. Because, they patiently explain, there’s only so much you can charge for a subscription before existing subscribers stop re-upping and new subscribers never materialize. Because postage is a dozen times more expensive than it was in 1975. Because salaries and compensation and insurance and taxes and corporate overhead and big rolls of glossy paper are more expensive. Because the advertising dollars that once subsidized those subscription prices have dwindled by two-thirds under pressure from Internet outlets and corporate bottom lines.

Are you having trouble filling pages, they ask? Well, uh, um, No, I say. We get roughly a thousand submissions a year and buy roughly 40 of them. True, we no longer see a few of the big names, but there are endless hungry and talented replacements. And those big names? All were once hungry and talented replacements.

Are we done here? they say. Yes, I say. Thank God I’m 64 and not 24. And as I turn to leave, in a gesture of solidarity with the downtrodden literati, I invite them all to stuff their beans and attempt an anatomical improbability with themselves.

Not, of course, where they can actually hear me. They’re merciless, those beancounters and their stupid math.

It’s getting harder to do anything for money.

Did you find your food writer in the end?

A good memory, P.F. Yes, I auditioned a dozen potentials for the food columnist gig, and found one posting intelligible English and remarkable thinking on a food blog generally full of hot air and unsubstantiated opinion. Psssst, I says. Wanna tax-deduct your MAC knives and Robot Coupe? Your every meal? Have I got a deal for you.

He’s been at it a year, now. And keeps getting better. Six 1500-word columns a year, for what he’d make working half-time at McDonalds, before taxes.

Sorry Michael old sport. Didn’t see your response when I posted earlier.

Well, this whole ‘inevitability of death’ things is not actually scientifically proven.

1. The death rate of humans isn’t 100% given that (according to present estimates) only 91% of humans that have lived have also died.
2. There are several examples of animals that, outside of some kind of external factor (like being eaten by a fisherman), would live forever: Turtles. Lobsters…
   Frankly what we need is a bit more of a positive attitude and maybe a few more clever people putting their minds to the problem of solving death instead of whatever short-termist nonsense they are currently wasting all our lives on.

You know, sometimes I think you people don’t get when I’m being flippant.

Must be rewarding when you can help an emerging talent develop like that! Good for you!

They’re pretty good for photo editing. Get a DSLR, shoot in RAW, and install Adobe Lightroom.

It’s an editor’s job description. Anne Frank and Julia Child are both icons today, for very different reasons, thanks to Judith Jones at Knopf. Every working writer today is a working writer because some editor plucked her from the slush pile or saw his writing in some obscure outlet and encouraged them to stretch.