![[Logo]](/images/101ReasonsLogo.png "101 Reasons to Stop Writing")
This post is now part of the About This Blog page.
Most advice about writing fiction (and there is way too much of it) focuses on how to get started, how to improve your writing, how to get published, etc. Some of it is even written by successful, published writers that you have heard of.
Virtually none of this advice focuses on when to give up, when to abandon your ridiculous dreams and get back to paying your taxes.
Face it. Most published fiction is bad. Some is so plain awful that you wonder how anyone wrote it, let alone approved it for publication. Don’t tell me it’s never crossed your mind how craptacular the unpublished stuff must be.
This blog is dedicated to the thousands of writers out there, labouring in deserved obscurity, murdering forests and supporting the postal system, wondering what the hell they’re doing wrong.
I’ll tell you. And God help me, I’ll make you stop.
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Oh, welcome, welcome, welcome.
This is gonna be fun
I’m all for it. I quit nearly five years ago, and it’s high time to have a support group.
brilliant, you’ve saved me the trouble…I’ll be recommending your site to all
My fellows in the He-Man Writers Club discovered your site after we theorized the need for one like this. Bravo. I searched in vain for a quote from Marcel Duchamp that went something like this: Make the least amount of art you possibly can. In my college days this was very important (ie. party!). I heard another one attributed to Alice Munro: Most novels have enough ideas for one short story. I’ll keep lookiing for the accurate quotes.
I’m dying of curiosity. Just how many craptacular unpublished manuscripts have you read? Are you a retired slush reader or (perhaps worse) a retired member of a public writers’ group?
I hope you succeed and eliminate at least some of the bad writers out there. I’m not one of them. Everything I write is a solid pearl of wisdom and perfection, a future best-seller. Or at least, I’ve already crapped out half a million words of fiction and gotten enough honest feedback to get a sense that I’ve improved. I still have ambitions, so I’d never write a blog like this … but it’s tempting!
Loved what you wrote for this. Though it pains me to tell you that it did the exact opposite for me. After reading this I wanted to write more, and not turn in the pen and paper.
Let’s face it; those that can, do. Those that can’t do, write about the act of writing. Those that can’t write about the act of writing go to writer’s club meetings. Those that can’t attend writer’s club meetings are running blogs. In all cases, it’s just occupational therapy until we hit the dirt nap.