Everybody wants to be a writer and they should.
Go to any bookstore and read the names. Stephanie Meyer. J.K. Rowling.
The Da Vinci Code Guy. I never hear about these people collecting
garbage or working at Wal-Mart. Writing must be all they have to do,
which means they have to get paid a lot. Now look at the whole
bookstore. That’s a lot of writers, all getting paid millions of
dollars. And it’s so easy to write!
I read a book by Mark Twain once and it
sounded like how people talk. Imagine how easy it was for him to just
write what he’d say. You could talk into a tape recorder for a while and
then pay someone else to type it out for you with the millions of
dollars all writers get paid.
But if you are old fashioned and want to
write by hand, that’s fine. All you have to do is sit and type. You
don’t even have to type that much. Ernest Hemingway once said that if
you write a page a day then you have a 365-page novel at the end of the
year. I’ve never checked his math but assume he’s right because he’s
famous. So if you write about a page, you’re pretty much done for the
day. Thanks to Spell Check you don’t even have to edit anymore.
Also, I never heard of Hemingway doing
anything but writing and getting drunk. Again: writing is a sweet job
since you don’t have to do anything else in your whole life.
I don’t really know how publishing works,
but you get paid in a lot of ways. There’s the advance before you even
write it, then they pay you when you give them the book, and royalties
when they start selling it. Since you get millions every time, that’s
three million for one book. You get even more millions after they make a
movie out of it. A lot of movies are based on books, so I assume all
books become movies that pay you extra and you don’t even have to pay
taxes on that.
It’s not all fun, though. Eventually your
hand cramps up from signing so many autographs and people who are scared
of crowds might get nervous from being stopped and fondled on the
street by their flocks of teen fans. I’m sure it gets annoying
eventually. It’s probably why Hemingway drank. I don’t know because I’ve
never read his books. But what I’m saying is that if you’re not ready
to be rich and really popular, writing might seem overwhelming.
Fortunately book tours and interviews are totally optional since they
pay you the same no matter what.
I’d tell you more but this is almost a full page. So in conclusion, I want to write because it’s easy and pays a lot.
