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Think writing a book is easy? You can cram it.

Thsis is about a million times more likely than you becoming the next J.K. Rowling or Steph Meyer.

This is about a million times more likely than you becoming the next J.K. Rowling or Steph Meyer.

Occasionally I say to people things like, “I have written a book, and I hope it’s published someday.”

And occasionally they reply with things like, “Oh, I could write a book. I’ll do that someday.”

Good for you.  Wanting to write a book is a fine aspiration. But. Often when folks say “I want to write a book”, what they really mean is “I want to become fantastically rich and famous like J.K. Rowling or Stephenie Meyer, and writing a book is an easy path to riches and fame.”

No, it isn’t. Writing a book is hard. (Seriously: it’s really, really hard. Mine took almost five years and it’s still not finished. It’s tough.) Writing a good book is harder. Landing an agent is even harder. Landing a publisher is harder still. Becoming a bestselling author is so hard that the previous steps seem no more difficult than plucking the petals from a flower by comparison. And becoming the next J.K. Rowling or Stephenie Meyer is not only hard, it’s so phenomenally improbable that you are literally more likely to stand on the moon someday than achieve their level of success.

So if you want to write a book: do it. Do it because you want to a story you’re passionate about. Not because it’s a get-rich-quick scheme any idiot can exploit.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, November 28th, 2009 at 1:44 pm and is filed under Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  • http://rachelhills.tumblr.com Rachel

    Do people really think book writing is easy? I definitely think it’s an achievable goal, providing you have some natural talent as a writer* (which you obviously do) – I’ve seen lots and lots of people do it – but it’s definitely not easy. As I may have said to you before, I think the main thing that separates those who want to write books from those who do is persistence and dedication – pushing through for months and usually years until the goal is achieved. At the moment, I fall into the former category. ;)

    * And even, in some cases, if you don’t.

  • Sam

    There’s an episode of Futurama where Fry (the dimwit pizza boy) has to write a screenplay, but it only goes for about three minutes. He says: “It took an hour to write – I thought it’d take an hour to read!”

    I think a lot of people feel the same way about writing books; that because they don’t take that long to read, they don’t take that long to write.