Seriously, don’t be a writer

Are you thinking about becoming a writer? Well, don’t. That’s my advice. Don’t do it. Please.

Too many of you think that after watching a few YouTube videos, you can become the next Tolkien, Sandersen, or whoever’s hitting the bestseller charts these days. But the real world doesn’t work that way. I get tired of saying this, but writing a book isn’t like composing an email or arguing with some Flat Earther on Facebook. It takes years and maybe decades of practice to produce a story the general public will want to read. It’s really not so different from learning to play the violin beautifully enough so people will pay to hear your performance. Yet here we are in 2025, drowning in Something Something Dragons by indie authors who could not pass Creative Writing 101.

As far as I’m concerned, Amazon is a plague upon the written word. Authors who have devoted their lives to storytelling, many with advanced English degrees, are indiscriminately shuffled in with middle school prose, soulless dreck crapped out by ChatGPT, and would-be business types looking to cash in without ever having read a novel in their lives. Yes, I know I still belong to the indie camp, but I sincerely wish I had been born two decades earlier, so that if I were to fail, I would at least fail due to a lack of merit, not my lack of social media followers.

If you think you can write a masterpiece after watching a movie, playing a video game, or because you got bored during COVID, please do us all a favor and STOP! For the love of Homer, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Poe, and all the dead authors who came before us, just stop. Don’t be a writer if you’re unprepared to devote yourself to learning the craft.

In my latest podcast (my second on this topic), I read from two indie writers (I won’t mention names) asking for my help—not help learning how to write a compelling narrative, mind you, but help getting their names out. These writers, I believe, are wasting their money advertising their work when they should be spending much more time reading, editing, and rewriting.

But if you seriously want to do this, here are some tips:

Read a minimum of 100 fiction books. This should help you become familiar with the rudiments of spelling, grammar, and style. I can always tell how well-read someone is by reading their work!
Write ten short stories and share them with friends, family, and strangers. Do they love it? Hate it? Take their advice to heart and rewrite with an effort to improve.
Write a novel with the expectation that nobody will probably read it. Then write another and another. This is the most painful part of the process. You may someday return to these stories after mastering the craft, but by then, you’ll most likely want to focus on something new.