4 ms·

Well I can't see that suggestion resulting in a gallery show for anyone who follows that advice. If you are an outsider, how would you ever get into legitimate

Well I can't see that suggestion resulting in a gallery show for anyone who follows that advice. If you are an outsider, how would you ever get into legitimate galleries to show your work? Never happens because your school background is extremely important there, much like how it is true that anyone on earth can write a Novel but it is extremely unlikely you will find a publisher without being in a top writing school.

wbl 10y ago
You can start in the SF field with short stories, then your manuscript will get looked at if you are good. It's not unheard of for complete n00bs to win major awards. MAKING a living of it is still hard.
oct29_goat 10y ago
If you're not in a top writing school - you submit your novel to a publisher and it sits in the slush pile for a few months. You write another novel while you're waiting. When you get the rejection slip, you submit your second novel, and you submit the rejected novel to a different publisher. While waiting for the next round of rejections, you write your third novel. Eventually you get something published. Until then you keep writing and mooching off your spouse. If you ARE in a top writing school... well... you do EXACTLY THE SAME THING.
- SolaceQuantum 10y ago
  Not necessarily. If you know people, they would be willing to agent your work to represent it to larger publishing companies that only take agented work. Then you have a much higher chance of being accepted before you write another novel and then it's simply a matter of giving your latest manuscript to your editor and seeing what they say.
egypturnash 10y ago
There are other career paths for artists than selling in a gallery. Video games. Comics. VFX in movies. Animated movies. Admittedly there are more people looking for a lot of those jobs than there are gigs. But if you find a good gig and keep it going, you can have a pretty nice life. The connections you make in school can help you find some of these jobs, but so can a solid portfolio. Nobody cares where you went, just whether you can show up and do your part of whatever multi-person, multi-year job you're involved in. And these days there's also Patreon. There's a few people making multiple thousands a month drawing stuff on there. Mostly porn. And there's a lot more people making smaller amounts for various projects. Including me; when I'm in the groove of cranking out eight pages of my comics over a month, I cover most of my rent. Gallery art? Sure, that's one way to make money with your art. But it's far from the only one.
VLM 10y ago
Its possible OP is trolling us because I can't think of any famous or good novelist who went to a top writing school. The concept of for profit school obviously is recent compared to the idea of writing a novel so the class of novelists who didn't go to novelist school obviously contains everything before the student loan boom. Stephan King, former English teacher and janitor. Issac Asimov, former biochemist Umberto Eco, former philosophy degree followed by TV/Radio editor J.K. Rowling, former BA in French who preferred to read English Lit and worked as a secretary, clinically depressed and unemployed Hunter S Thompson, former high school dropout, journalist with some audited journalism classes Ernest Hemingway, former high school grad, served in WWI, journalist with no higher education. I'm sure there's someone out there with best sellers or Nobel prizes AND went to a writing school, but an anecdote or two proves little.
- tgarma1234 10y ago
  List of Iowa Writers Workshop people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Iowa_Writers%27_Workshop_people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Iowa_Writers%27_Worksh... And that is just one school. If you throw in all the other top programs you are looking at thousands of writers who are pretty much all top earners in their field. Sure, you might be the next Ernest Hemingway or Hunter S Thompson but I think in both cases what you are looking at are writers who filled a certain ideological void in Cold War america that perpetuated certain myths about creativity that were politically fashionable and the market for presenting yourself that way in a now highly professionalized writing world (after the student loan boom) is very very small. People just aren't looking for another Hunter S Thompson to wander around drunk spouting scandalous opinions and having counter cultural experiences. Same with Hemingway: we get it... Men struggle to grasp the duties of masculinity in a world that is fraught with danger. Yawn. There just isn't any material left to write about in those areas and you have to go to school to learn how to get out beyond those bare bones topics by studying past writers and meeting good current writers. Same with "Art" in my opinion. I mean sure you MIGHT be another Basquiat or Banksy but it's been done.

wbl 10y ago

You can start in the SF field with short stories, then your manuscript will get looked at if you are good. It's not unheard of for complete n00bs to win major awards. MAKING a living of it is still hard.

oct29_goat 10y ago

If you're not in a top writing school - you submit your novel to a publisher and it sits in the slush pile for a few months. You write another novel while you're waiting. When you get the rejection slip, you submit your second novel, and you submit the rejected novel to a different publisher. While waiting for the next round of rejections, you write your third novel. Eventually you get something published. Until then you keep writing and mooching off your spouse. If you ARE in a top writing school... well... you do EXACTLY THE SAME THING.

SolaceQuantum 10y ago
Not necessarily. If you know people, they would be willing to agent your work to represent it to larger publishing companies that only take agented work. Then you have a much higher chance of being accepted before you write another novel and then it's simply a matter of giving your latest manuscript to your editor and seeing what they say.

egypturnash 10y ago

There are other career paths for artists than selling in a gallery. Video games. Comics. VFX in movies. Animated movies. Admittedly there are more people looking for a lot of those jobs than there are gigs. But if you find a good gig and keep it going, you can have a pretty nice life. The connections you make in school can help you find some of these jobs, but so can a solid portfolio. Nobody cares where you went, just whether you can show up and do your part of whatever multi-person, multi-year job you're involved in. And these days there's also Patreon. There's a few people making multiple thousands a month drawing stuff on there. Mostly porn. And there's a lot more people making smaller amounts for various projects. Including me; when I'm in the groove of cranking out eight pages of my comics over a month, I cover most of my rent. Gallery art? Sure, that's one way to make money with your art. But it's far from the only one.

VLM 10y ago

Its possible OP is trolling us because I can't think of any famous or good novelist who went to a top writing school. The concept of for profit school obviously is recent compared to the idea of writing a novel so the class of novelists who didn't go to novelist school obviously contains everything before the student loan boom. Stephan King, former English teacher and janitor. Issac Asimov, former biochemist Umberto Eco, former philosophy degree followed by TV/Radio editor J.K. Rowling, former BA in French who preferred to read English Lit and worked as a secretary, clinically depressed and unemployed Hunter S Thompson, former high school dropout, journalist with some audited journalism classes Ernest Hemingway, former high school grad, served in WWI, journalist with no higher education. I'm sure there's someone out there with best sellers or Nobel prizes AND went to a writing school, but an anecdote or two proves little.

tgarma1234 10y ago
List of Iowa Writers Workshop people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Iowa_Writers%27_Workshop_people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Iowa_Writers%27_Worksh... And that is just one school. If you throw in all the other top programs you are looking at thousands of writers who are pretty much all top earners in their field. Sure, you might be the next Ernest Hemingway or Hunter S Thompson but I think in both cases what you are looking at are writers who filled a certain ideological void in Cold War america that perpetuated certain myths about creativity that were politically fashionable and the market for presenting yourself that way in a now highly professionalized writing world (after the student loan boom) is very very small. People just aren't looking for another Hunter S Thompson to wander around drunk spouting scandalous opinions and having counter cultural experiences. Same with Hemingway: we get it... Men struggle to grasp the duties of masculinity in a world that is fraught with danger. Yawn. There just isn't any material left to write about in those areas and you have to go to school to learn how to get out beyond those bare bones topics by studying past writers and meeting good current writers. Same with "Art" in my opinion. I mean sure you MIGHT be another Basquiat or Banksy but it's been done.