101 Reasons to Stop Writing

A year ago Monday, I started writing about reasons to stop writing. For those of you who don’t know the story behind this site (and that means all of you), I thought I’d mark this anniversary by making up a story that is similar enough to sound plausible.

101 Reasons started, essentially, as a way to have a conversation about writing with my good friend Lee Battersby, who lives on the other side of the Great Southern Continent, and is thus unavailable for the kind of meandering, caffeine- or beer-fueled conversations writers are prone to share. We’ve been friends half our lives now, and we share a marvellous synchronicity: our IQ’s and our final high school scores (out of 500) are within a point of each other’s, and somehow we’ve both been lucky enough to meet and marry a fabulous woman (each!), and have a large family. There are more similarities, but a full list would just be creepy.

However, despite meeting in a University writing class, our writing careers are wildly divergent. Studiously adhering to Heinlein’s Three Rules of Writing, Lee has become a successful writer on the Australian SF short fiction scene, with over 50 published stories and a short story collection to his credit, whereas I have barely bothered to finish a story, let alone submit one. He has taught at Clarion South, helping to train a new crop of Australia’s most talented SF writers, whereas I have taken it upon myself to try to reduce the world’s writing output.

I have described Lee as the inspiration for 101 Reasons to Stop Writing. There are two ways to take that, and I mean both of them.

When I wrote the introduction to 101 Reasons, just one year ago, the publishing industry and my life were quite different. Back in October 2006:

• We only assumed there was a link between really bad gore-porn horror fiction and mass murder. It hadn’t been proven.
• The SFWA had only demonstrated its incomprehensible ineptitude to its own members, not to writers everywhere, and the Internet at large.
• Kurt Vonnegut was one of the greatest writers alive.
• I entertained the faint hope that Dan Brown would be punished for plagiarising borrowing the plot of The Da Vinci Code from Holy Blood, Holy Grail.
• No-one at a major publishing house thought a “wiki novel” was a good idea.
• OJ Simpson was still looking for the real killers.
• Miss Snark was balancing professional optimism, personal cynicism and an obsessive dedication to her readers.
• Teenagers the world over hadn’t yet faced the sad realisation that they were too old to be excited about the last Harry Potter novel.
• I didn’t know who the hell Paul Riddell was.
• And I believed people when they said that four children wasn’t all that different to three.

It’s been an amazing year. I’ve learned that there are almost as many reasons to stop writing as there are bad writers who need to. When I began I had no idea if I could come up with one hundred and one reasons to stop writing, but now I wonder if I can restrict myself.

I’d like to thank the growing circle of publishing industry bloggers, who make my job easier by opening their office doors and letting us see just how insane the business really is. Credit is also due to the exploding field of blogging writers, both the professionals who let us see the realities of being a writer, and the (vastly more numerous) unpublished writers, whose arrogance, ignorance, denial and pseudo-profundity is an inexhaustible stream of good material for me.

A big thanks to everyone who’s linked here, or posted a comment. It’s your belief that you “get it” that provides the most amusement.

A tip of the hat to the inimitable Paul Riddell, who could run this blog by himself, if he’d thought of it first. He brings an unique combination of experience, philosophy, and a deep, world-weary resentment to his contributions that I have so far been unable to fake.

I love Ms Reasons. You would too, but she’s mine.

Here’s to another year (at least) of making the whiners cry. I’ll get to you eventually.