5 ms·
> take the hope of actually being able to support yourself by writing and no... even the most obsessive of obsessive writers will likely give up, from starvatio
by klibertp 6y ago
> take the hope of actually being able to support yourself by writing and no... even the most obsessive of obsessive writers will likely give up, from starvation if nothing else.
Millions of fanfiction writers would like to have a word with you... Not to mention all the authors of comments on this very site, some of which are, at least, good enough to be paid articles somewhere, or in cooperation with other commenters could be turned (as whole threads) into short books in their own right.
Put another way: the music industry could entirely vanish overnight, and people would still sing in the shower and when drinking with their buddies.
Some people tend to express themselves in some way, and they would do it regardless of literally anything. We've achieved high literacy rates, which gave a tool of expression that is writing to a correspondingly high number of people. It's not exactly surprising that we now have a flourishing environment of Web novels and all kinds of written content outside of the "market" and publishing industry as a whole.
But it's not something specific to our times. Plenty of writers in history did starve do death. One of "the three greatest" poets of my country did precisely that: he wasn't published, he wasn't even read much, and when he was, he was ridiculed for it. Yet he had been writing anyway; then, he died in extreme poverty, leaving just a lot of paper behind. It took some 40 years IIRC for someone to "rediscover" the stash of hand-written poems, and now his works are being taught in highschools.
In yet other words: no, not everything has to be related to money. Many things are, yes, but not all. Writing as a profession that published (and paid) authors do is all fine and good, but it's just one side of writing, not its definition.
- the_af 6y agoThanks for writing this! Now I'm really curious about who this poet was.
- klibertp 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyprian_Norwid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyprian_Norwid > Norwid led a tragic and often poverty-stricken life (once he had to live in a cemetery crypt). He experienced increasing health problems, unrequited love, harsh critical reviews, and increasing social isolation. ...and yet his works are easily (IMO) the best among the three of them (the two others would be Mickiewicz and Słowacki).
- Noos 6y agocool, let's stop paying programmers then. You can write and maintain software for free. Because you'd do it without pay right? I mean, why are authors the ones who don't have to get paid?
- the_af 6y agoI think you're arguing against a strawman. Nobody argued that writers (or programmers) shouldn't get paid; just that writing (and programming) also exist outside the realm of monetary compensation. People write (books and code) for many reasons: because they are passionate about it, for the recognition by their peers, because they want to enter a contest, because of vanity, and yes, because of money. Getting paid is fine and dandy. What's false is that "without a business model", nobody would be "insane enough" to write books (or programs). The conflation between doing a thing and getting paid for doing a thing -- or even worse, claiming that without monetary compensation said thing wouldn't exist -- is annoying and misleading.
- account42 6y agoI write and maintain a lot of open source software for free.
- boomlinde 6y agoI do, too. I also write software for money, as a way to finance my living expenses. When I write software for free and distribute it freely for others to use, I do it on my own volition. The day someone else decides for me that the development work I do for a living should also be free, I will have a serious problem.
- klibertp 6y agoNeither the_af nor I are saying that all the writing should be done without the authors being paid for it. We asserted, twice!, that professional authors and publishing industry are OK. What we say is that the published authors who earn a living by writing are not the only source of writing. If all the publishers, the whole industry, would go bankrupt tomorrow, the Web novels would still get new chapters, new fanfics would still get written, new essays would still be put on blogs, new comment threads would still appear, and so on. Being paid for writing is great. It's just that the paid writing is not all writing - some people write simply to be read, without needing or wanting to be paid for it. Writing code is different, because it's a means of self-expression only in small part.
- goto11 6y ago> Plenty of writers in history did starve to death. And you are using this as an argument why authors don't need income? Surely they didn't write anything after they starved, so it seem lack of income did affect the output.