What If I Don’t Want to Write For A Living?

Don’t try to suck the fun out of writing by making it a job.

Writing to get paid sucks the fun out of it.

I’m serious.

It sucks to write as a job — especially because I write to escape from having to work.

The problem is my writing sucks, and the only way to get good is to have some sort of plan to improve. Whether that means writing a lot or analyzing something before making it.

Writing something with that level of effort is labor. Labor isn’t fun. I don’t want to do that.

I want to be the magically gifted writer of my dreams and rely purely on my vast encyclopedic knowledge to create great works. Obviously, that’s the only way to write. Anything other than that becomes the dreaded job.

I hate the idea of having to hone some sort of craft with a bunch of exercises and trying to do something great.

I don’t want to be a great writer; I just want to have an easy job. I don’t like to work, and that’s the only reason I write.

I refuse to make it a chore for myself.

The article above is basically a transcript of an interview with R.L. Stine, the wildly successful children’s book author.

There’s this great part in the interview where Stine says that he doesn’t care to slave over his writing. Stine is a guy that at one point was churning out two books a month, and has published more than three-hundred books in his lifetime.

Writing for him is about having fun, and that’s the best possible goal in life.

I don’t want to be the person who spends so much time slaving over research and making the best possible articles or posts. Life is too short to be right all the time.

It’s best to be honest.

I’m telling you here, that in my career as a writer, I want to have fun, and I want to go in an honest direction. That means that I’m gonna be wrong — a lot.

I refuse to spend time writing on sticky notes about all the ideas I have. I refuse to pour my heart and soul into researching minute details.

I don’t mean I’m never going to concentrate on making stories that have great settings or that I’ll be talking out of my elbows.

I want to know what I’m talking about, but I also don’t care that if I write a story set in 1952 and mention an model of a typewriter that was invented in 1953. Unless my story is “A History of Typewriters from 1942–1952,” the mistake is moot.

Stories are about the characters, and what they do, and how they behave. It’s something to enjoy and have fun with the way a kid who loves making stories up with their toys does.

Contrary to the pill that people try to sell us about life being about constant improvement or doing the best job, there are moments where that all fades away.

When I’m laughing I don’t think of how I could be laughing better, or how I could laugh more often — I just laugh. I don’t want to worry about the fine print.

I love Lord of the Rings. Maybe I should rephrase that: I love Middle-Earth, and I think Tolkein’s writing is some of the best that I’ve ever read. One of my favorite books is the Silmarilion.

But the first half of it sucks. A lot.

It’s boring; it’s just a bunch of descriptions and weird names that are stupidly hard to remember. It was only until I got to the second and third parts of the book when those random names became characters that I started to enjoy it.

It was only after I started seeing how the songs that were sung at the beginning of the book were bits of foreshadowing for the pattern of events throughout the rest of the history of Middle-Earth.

But the best part of the Silmarilion is how fleshed out it is.

It’s a story that feels like someone lived through it. It feels like this was all going on in Tolkein’s head, and he’s just giving us the report. His world has its own rules and its own structure, and it was all pre-determined during the songs of creation.

Melkor’s behavior during those songs determines the path of evil for all time in the story. It’s fucking awesome.

Lord of the Rings is cool, and I want to write cool stuff too.