![[Logo]](/images/101ReasonsLogo.png "101 Reasons to Stop Writing")
April 23, 2008: Updated to Reason #17: It’s Allegorical.
101 Reasons to Stop Writing is a work in progress. Yes, there will be 101 reasons. No, they are not all here yet. No, they’re not in any specific order. Yes, I really do know what I’m doing.
This post will be updated as new Reasons are added. The list may not always be up to date, because I’m really lazy.
If you haven’t taken a chance on a new, unproven author in the last five years, why the hell would you expect anyone else to?
There was a time when lazy newbies thought all you had to do was write a fat, scary book about Billy the Truck-Stop Grease Monkey and The Slobbering Pus-Beast from America’s Dark Heart, and publishers would cut you a seven digit cheque.
Addendum: Post-Halloween Wrap-up Special
Putting 50,000 words in nonrandom order in 30 days makes you a ‘writer’ in exactly the same sense that changing a hundred lightbulbs makes you an electrician.
[NaNoWriMo participants] need to average 1,666.666 words per day. You probably haven’t written that much since your high school English exam.
Padding: When you run out of ideas, but keep on writing. It’s also something insecure rockstars do to their crotches. The fluff covering the flaccid.
Imagine your next book, all gussied up in a sexy cover, with a jacket blurb that exactly captures the spirit of your story. [...] Would you (or a hypothetical reader just like you) even pick it up?
If you think “Hey, the average book only sells 500 copies, what’s the point of even trying?”, then I say: Bravo! Stop writing, and you’ll have more time to read books written by people better than you.
You can call yourself a ‘writer’ without any requirement to actually produce anything, which is why it’s so difficult to define ‘quitting’. Quitting implies failure, or at least non-success, and you can’t fail if you never set any standard for yourself.
Addendum: Stay the Course vs Cut and Run
You’re probably not at this stage (yet). Your friends still call to let you know when they’re getting married or moving away. You haven’t wondered if you can save on toilet paper by wiping your ass on the rejection slips, then rinsing them off. When you get a rejection, there’s still a small part of you who knows it’s because the story was crap.
A better word here and there won’t make your writing suck less. It just shows that you own a thesaurus, and don?t know when to not use it.
Writing sex scenes is hard, oh oh my god it’s sooo hard. It’s often a delicate balance between awkward metaphor and guttertalk euphemism. It’s either the sunlit unfolding of silken petals, or his c*** slammed into her c***.
Addendum: Now With Even More Sex!
For every sexual sequence in a novel that imparts some insight into the characters, let alone the human condition, there are thousands which exist solely because the author got to page 180 and realised the main characters hadn’t fscked yet. Almost all of them could be edited down to “And then they did it,” without losing anything original.
The cyber-fantasy of online, instant feedback and criticism is hampered by two obvious inertias:
- I can’t be bothered reading your crap, let alone providing detailed constructive criticism; and
- Even if I did, you’d just get all huffy and tell me I’m wrong and too stupid to understand the deeper layers of puke below the crap.
Addendum: You Think You Can Fix Publishing
It takes a special kind of arrogance to believe anyone wants to read your work. But if that arrogance extends to thinking everyone in publishing is stupider than you, and your only contribution is unoriginal, unworkable ideas, then you’re just like every other schizophrenic barfly who thinks he’s running for President.
Grammar is not just the green squiggly line under most of your sentences in MS Word. Nor is it something your septuagenarian English teacher invented because your stories were just so edgy, so radical, he had to fail you.
You are not Dan Brown. I’m sure you’ve noticed this, unless you happened to wake up this morning with the surviving members of Pink Floyd playing ‘Money’ live in your bedroom.
Publishers are desperate for the Next Big Thing, and they’re prepared to spend even less money on even more books than ever before. So, while slushpile manuscripts are getting worse, less money and time is being put into polishing the rough gems. These days it’s write well, and sell well, or get the hell out.
Clichés are the cancer of fiction. They may be hard to spot at first — a borrowed phrase here, a stock character there — but if left unchecked, they can metastasize throughout your prose, infecting any shreds of originality and talent, until your output is nothing but puerile dross. See, it’s happening already.
Addendum: Clichépalooza!
Now that you’ve begun to accept that you’re a lazy, plagiarising fanfic writer, let’s look at some of the different forms of cliché that you frequently abuse, and how you can identify them — so you can plainly see that your fiction is merely a string of old, stolen ideas held together with conjunctions.
There is no shame in admitting that you’ve run out of ideas. The shame comes when you try to charge people to discover for themselves you’ve run out of ideas.
Allegory is when the entire story becomes a metaphor for something else — whether or not the author intended it as such. You’re probably familiar with the term from its most commonly-used phrase, “But it’s really an allegory for … “, usually followed by an unconvincing “Oh yeah, I knew that.”
Reasons 18-101 to come. When the list is complete, if you haven’t stopped writing, then God help you.
Loading ...
REASON #16: YOU’VE PURCHASED EVERY BOOK UNDER THE SUN ABOUT WRITING.
No Plot? No Problem! Writing the Breakout Novel, and Self-Editing for Fiction Writers are just a few of hundreds of poorly written trash on how to write. Buying these books won’t make you a good writer, it will only make the authors and editors who put out this garbage wealthier, resulting in more crappy how-to-write books.
The wannabees and the unfinished purchase these books by the dozen, hoping in their simple minds that by reading these books they will become the next Stephen King/J.K. Rowling/Nora Roberts.
If you feel you have to rely on these books, stop writing, right now. Break all your pens, through all your typewriters and computers off the top floor of the Sears Tower. Do it, right now.
REASON #17 BARBARA BAUER AND OTHER LITERARY SCAMMERS WILL GO OUT OF BUSINESS
Barbara Bauer and a host of other scam artists posing as literary agents only make money if people write and then come to them with their manuscripts and pay them thousands of dollars to “edit” and “sell” their work to a “publisher.”
If you people would stop writing, Babsi and her friends would have to find some other way to scam you gullible fools out of your money.
Reason #18 Sean Lindsey would have to go on to other ventures.
If everyone stopped writing, Sean Lindsey’s work here would be done. And then he would go on to tackle other issues such as, hicks procreating, people driving like morons, and people being idiotic in general.
[...] I stumbled across a blog called 101 Reasons To Stop Writing, and found it darkly amusing. The guy who writes the site, Sean Lindsey, states that his mission is [...]
#16 You like dose perttty werds:
There is an ancient Chinese proverb, “Don’t use a $10 word when you could just fill the page with pictures of boobs or jokes about dead hookers.”
Another link for your site:
http://www.theonion.com/content/news/novelists_strike_fails_to_affect
The Onion is satire admittedly, but sometimes truth is said in jest.
I really want to tell a story. Actually I don’t, but at this point I have to. It’ll most likely suck, but it doesn’t matter, because nothing matters. I’ve never read a fantasy novel I liked. They all suck, they’re all boring and none have any philosophical point behind them. They’re entertainment. Why do people love entertainment? Because they know their pathetic life is meaningless and they have no philosophy of their own. I hate writing almost as much as I hate reading, but yet I have to write something. I’d rather just commit suicide, but if I do, people’ll keep going on with the delusion that their life matters, when it doesn’t, so I’ll have to tell them. If I can get just one person to realize that they don’t matter, it’ll be worth dealing with the pain of living another day.
[...] 6, 2008 101 Reasons to Stop Writing Posted in Entertainment [...]
to be followed by 101 reasons to stop blogging, which is to be followed by 101 reasons to stop writing about not writing or blogging.
…if you spent half your ‘writing’ time in school instead, you’d already be rich.
…Getting famous by writing is like getting struck by lightning… on the moon.
…you’ll spend 5 years writing and polishing your masterpiece until you F-ing hate it, just to have your friends say “I think I’ll write a book too, it sounds like fun.”
…the bottom just fell out of the market for teen angst supernatural sci-fi cheerleader novels written by, for, and about females (just kidding, that market will never die. Too bad you write something else.)
…apathy and alcoholism already run in the family, if you’re still writing you might as well pull the trigger
…as soon as you get published, everybody else will too. you might as well just quit now.
Reason 102: If you actually get any fans, they might force you into writing a sequel.
1) you think you have something great to say
2) you think you are witty
3) you adhere to formulas
4) you seek to entertain the masses
5) you call yourself a writer, as if it bestows some great dignity
6) the only books you will read are novels
7) you disagree with any of these other 6
#18 You enjoy reading Stephenie Meyer. If you like books that read like a 14 year old girl’s diary, then chances are your writing reads like a 14 year old girl’s diary too.
so, you’re saying since our writing is autmatically going to suck, we can’t just do it for fun, even if we know and accpet it’s going to be trash?
You are an angry, bitter, vicious writer. I love it. Thank you for giving me a reason (plus 100 more on top of that) not to go on. The weight off my shoulders is like a cliche.
[...] Finally, I moved my hand to my mouse, opened IE, and read the freakin’ typo-laden headlines on the local newspaper (my home page.) I moseyed up to the RSS feeds, hoping–nay–praying Nathan Bransford had posted a new blog. I usually find him quite entertaining. Hell, that was 30 minutes ago and I couldn’t even tell you if he posted something new, and if he did, what it was. I don’t know what possessed me to click on Nathan’s FAQs, but I did. As I scrolled through the list I found “Should I quit writing?” Good Lord Almighty, how did he know that’s my question of the day? He didn’t have the answer, but he provided this link, http://101reasonstostopwriting.com/the-reasons/. [...]
I think we, like Sean Lindsay, prefer to make light of shortcomings rather than to overcome.
Write the book Sean, but call it “Metairony: How my denial became my secret defiance”…
Shit even I’ll pitch in the $5.99 for a good laxative toilet read laugh!
I’m saddened that you’ve stopped posting reasons after #17 (especially since you’ve never posted the reasons that you’d claimed were your own reasons for quitting), but if it takes a cynic to know one then I’ll be you didn’t want someone to steal your book idea before it’s published. Smart move Sean. And I’ll bet you shred every post-it note and shopping list with the same proprietary concern.
Tell me now: should I quit as well or would that make me just another one of your self-prescribed cliches?