Larry Correia's Advice

Larry Correia (Monster Hunter Intl) posted the following on Facebook

Maybe it was because I was a businessman and an accountant before I was an author, but I've never suffered from some of the delusions that plague my writing peers.

That's why my writing advice always includes something about how all writer's mission statements or motto should include GET PAID.

Serious answer as to why our industry suffers under this delusion, we've got a lot of crappy writers who produce crap nobody wants to pay money for. So to justify their failure to attract customers, they put on their ARTISTE berets and get all snooty about how art is more important than crass commercial capitalist blah blah blah.

It makes them feel better, but their delusion percolates out into the industry, so newer struggling writers buy into ti.

Screw that. GET PAID!

Authors are just another form of entertainer. We're not special.

Audiences don't work for authors. We work for them.

There are only two steps to being a professional author who GETS PAID.
1. Get good enough that people will give you money for your stuff.
2. Find the people who will give you money for your stuff.

How you accomplish those two things are irrelevant.

I've seen snooty writers claim that quantity never equals quality. That's asinine. The thing about art, the more of it you create, the better you'll get, the more likely you will be to create something truly wonderful. And gee whiz, it sure is easier to write more when you're able to pay the mortgage and buy food with your royalties.





Larry is spot on, but I think he doesn't go far enough. Why are there a lot of crappy writers? Simple. Ego. It's hard to admit you're not good at something. It's even harder to accept it when other people point out your failures. But the hardest thing of all is to admit your skills are lacking and then WORK to improve them. That's right work to improve your skills. Act like writing is a job and that to move up the ladder of success means that you have to keep getting better and better at what you do. Being a writer also means that like most jobs you start at the bottom and in ten or fifteen years you might be good enough at your job that you're paid enough to live on comfortably. That is a hard and bitter pill for people who have spent months working on their story. So they adopt an “Rousseauian artiste” snobbery of failure rather than admit they are the fry-cook of the publishing world and are paid a similar wage, denying reality to assuage their bruised ego.