Socially I have always tended to fall apart in the presence of powerful wealthy people but professionally when I had my interior store I had no problem dealing wit them one on one in their homes because the only expectation was that I give them what they were looking or. Looking back about 25 years I actually had a good working relationship with at that time was said to be the second richest woman in America. I have attempted to write social scenarios and they come out garbage. Everywhere I turn in this story I am stepping into areas I can’t carry as a writer. Be right back, minor emergency. I want to finish this thought.
My father’s retirement gig was as a limo driver. He did lots of long hauls between Cape Cod and New York for a wealthy, eccentric woman who hated to fly. If your rich guy also tries not to fly or if his plane is grounded for some reason, a long drive between between cities might work.
Shared interests are another possibility. Your rich guy could be an amateur race driver and your middle-class guy an SCCA instructor working for free track time. Or, up your alley, maybe your middle-class guy is an expert archer doing cutting edge research and whose blog is read by the wealthy bow hunter.
Skiing.
One of the wealthier persons in my country is just one of the guys at the ski hill.
Wealthy people often have hobbies.
My spouse the professional bagpiper would occasional give classes and workshops out east. On one such he met a billionaire. Didn’t know the guy was that rich because said billionaire wore worn blue jeans and a t-shirt just like everyone else, didn’t have handlers, etc. The wealth issue didn’t come up until bad weather cancelled transportation back home and the guy offered to put my husband and another guy up at his house overnight. By which he meant the main house of the multi-building residence.
Indirectly, that’s also why my electric piano has Ray Kurzweil’s autograph on it. My spouse was a big fan of Kurzweil.
So, really, almost any hobby type thing could be a way in.
Billionaires don’t always cruise around in Armani suits with an entourage. Sometimes they’re in blue jeans and sneakers and t-shirts like any ordinary person.
My brother is a bit of a big-shot in his industry - he’s been written up in a few finance magazines - and while he’s not a billionaire nor does he hang with any, he’s told me about friends of his who were paired up with big shots at the golf course to fill out a 4-some. I don’t know if billionaires routinely need to ask strangers to be their 4th, but who knows??
Various competions. Bill Gates plays bridge, for example. So I imagine he shows up occasionally at the local bridge club, sectional, or regional.
Art. While a billionaire might not necessarily go grocery shopping, they probably spend some time shopping for high end furniture and art. Or possibly making art.
And some billionaires live relatively normal lives, so I imagine they still have to drop the car off at the shop for an oil change now and then (although if I were a billionaire, that’s probably the first thing I delegate to some well paid flunky).
Every year we go out to the Bonneville Salt flats to hold our archery flight championships. Motor cycle racing is usually going on at the same time. Very often wealthy sponsors will wander over to our area to see what we are doing and engage us in conversations. Several times they have ended up spending more time with us than the motorcycles. This type of thing might be something I could carry as a writer.
How about marrying into the family somehow? I never knew any billionaires until I got married. Now I routinely spend holidays at the grandparents’ 7.5 million dollar home. And they aren’t the richest people in our family. (My husband is not wealthy. He was just this nerdy 18-year old I fell in love with, and a bunch of rich people came with the package.)
I’m going to refer to a post I made in another thread. If you do manage to assemble a novel that you still seem to have few ideas or even interest in writing just so that you can wedge your Idea The Must Be Shared into it, then there is a 99.9% chance you will come up with an unreadable train wreck. Just write a essay/proposal detailing the crowd-sourcing system that you hope to bring about, and if people find it interesting, the idea will spread around.
Yeah, now that I’ve learned more about this project, I can tell you that as a reader nothing pisses me off more than seeing a story take a backseat to some sort of ideological treatise. Very, precious few people pull this off - Harriet Beecher Stowe in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, maybe, but even Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle was 90% me being enamored and 10% me being furious the way the ending threw all of the characters’ development, motivations and life goals under the bus for an academic treatise on socialism. Your story must come first. Have you learned the basics of story structure? If you haven’t read some basic story structure books, get to it. My personal favorites are Structuring Your Novel by KM Weiland and The Story Grid by Shawn Coyne.
Which isn’t to say you can’t address issues you care about in a novel. That happens as a matter of course. My novel is about, among other things, poverty, racism, war, genocide, sexual assault and consensual kink. But my chief thought when I’m crafting it isn’t, ''How can I make people see my point of view on this issue?" It’s, ''How can I make this story more authentic and interesting?" That means I have to let my characters do or say or think things I don’t necessarily agree with, or be honest about aspects of reality that undercut my point rather than support it. Was it Stephen King’s On Writing where he discussed how readers pick up on dishonesty right away? You don’t want to leave them feeling jerked around.
I don’t want to discourage you from pursuing a passion project but I think a lot of people really underestimate how long it takes to learn to write a proper novel, and how much effort it entails. I’ve been working on mine for four years. The next one won’t take as long because I didn’t know what I was doing when I wrote the first one, and I have a better sense of how story works now. Having the technical talent to string pretty words together is not sufficient. If you’re serious - if you want to make something good - there’s a whole gritty underbelly of grueling labor, analysis and revision, researching writing craft, reading novels not for enjoyment but to see how they are put together, letting people put their eyes on your work and tear it to shreds in the interest of personal growth, and essentially giving your life over to the process. I would liken it to taking on a graduate school program in terms of time commitment and difficulty.
That’s why we often joke that the only people who write are people who have no other choice. The only reason anyone would ever want to take on something like a novel is a passion for writing fiction. It has to be inherently rewarding or you will give up long before you finish, because man, I’m telling you, it is hard. And I have plenty of published friends in my writer’s circle who report that it only ever gets harder.
I think the point of NaNoWriMo is not so much to have people churn out The World’s Greatest Novel but to try to write a novel. If you are too afraid of making mistakes to even try you’ll never succeed. Most successful endeavors involve at least some failure along the way, and sometimes a lot. You learn to write well by simply writing - you’ll start badly, but get better with practice. NaNoWriMo encourages you to practice, practice, practice.
So go ahead and let folks write bad novels, and fan fic, and make mistakes. Because those that will become good writers will learn from all that, and indeed that is how authors hone their craft. By writing.
I’ve found the NaNo paradigm helpful at some times and not at other times, but I guess if you’ve never tried you can’t know if it’s for you. It’s absolutely true that the only way to learn is by doing. It’s common for writers to have hangups about not trying or working inefficiently because of fear of mistakes. It really shouldn’t have taken me four years to write this book, I’ve just been obsessive about getting it perfect, which is a fictional state that can never exist. NaNoWriMo in theory should help writers deal with those kind of hangups by forcing us to just write.
I just, well, in another thread he explicitly said, ‘‘I don’t really care about the novel part…’’ which raised red flags for me. If you don’t really care about the novel, there are easier ways to achieve the real goal of telling people about this cool idea you have. He could spend years in a passionless fog trying to figure out how to write a novel good enough to sell his cool idea, or he could spend probably less time figuring out how to write a nonfiction book about his cool idea (not that nonfiction books aren’t also hard, but rather more suited to his goal, which will make the process easier.) I think the latter would have a higher probability of success.
If he’s actually having fun doing this, that’s another matter entirely. NaNo, if it should be about anything, should be about having fun writing.
I actually do care about the novel part more and more as I stay with this. I kind of like the idea of just writing it bad or good and getting it done. I might get some closure. I admit that conveying the idea takes precedence over the novel itself in that if I can't effectively do that the novel would be pointless.
This is exactly what I found attractive about it. A lot of the pressure seems off when I view it this way.
Well, that’s good. I encourage you to follow your enjoyment. Not everything has to be a deadly serious undertaking, and it’s easy for me to forget that because I spend about 10-20 hours a week writing and it’s work to me, and I’m very stressed out about finishing revisions on my current novel in the same way that someone would be stressed about meeting an important deadline at their job. I hope to build a sustainable career as a writer which means I have to treat it like a profession, which means not a lot of time to have fun. I have passion and satisfaction and I’m fulfilling a deep and abiding need to write, but ‘‘fun’’ doesn’t really enter into it. I’m a workhorse at this point.
I’m afraid that in the midst of my own stress I sort of imposed my own personal anxieties upon you, which is the antithesis of NaNoWriMo and not very nice. So please, have fun.
If I was realistically trying to contact a billionaire, I’d probably try to do it through a charity they had a connection with. Charities are usually something that billionaires have a personal interest in and make scheduled semi-public appearances for. So if your billionaire has an interest in saving whales, for example, you find a charity event for that cause where they’ll be making an appearance. Then you’d want to find somebody who could act as a middleman between you and the billionaire to get you an introduction at the event.
Essays seem to be what I really do enjoy writing. On this particular topic I have accumulated over 100 essays now I believe. There is some redundancy but not as much as it would seem. Every time I get going on the story itself I end up side tracked into another essay type piece focusing on some aspect that I am working through.
The threads I have started on this have all been helpful to me even if I end up walking away with something entirely different than I was looking for in the OP.
The past 6 months I have been playing caretaker to a cancer patient and an Alzheimer sufferer and it has left me little time to write. I try to squeeze in at least an hour or two a day but they haven’t been very productive hours.
By far the easiest route for me would be to simply write myself into the story and maybe just embellish things a bit. I can lay down a lot of pages quickly not having to create characters. I may just go this route for this particular challenge and then see what it looks like. It would feel good just to bring something to a conclusion even if it needed more work when finished.
Isn’t there a quote by someone famous that goes something like “Everyone has a novel inside of them and most of them should be strangled at birth.”? (The novels, not the people.)
I’m on the fence. I’ve seen writers with real flaws improve dramatically over the space of a couple years just through the sheer act of writing constantly. You can’t really improve without trying in the first place, and if writing is a joy who am I to be any sort of gatekeeper? It’s not as if I don’t have flaws of my own to tackle in this process. When I look at my own work, I’m overwhelmed by how much there is left to learn.
NaNo doesn’t focus on any of that, it focuses on cranking out 50k words of any quality in a short period of time and enjoying the doing. It attracts people who have no idea what they are doing and serious writers and everyone in between. I’ve been successful some years and not others. I like the ritual of it. It’s doable, and relatively easy to produce 50k words in a month. The question is what happens after that.
I’m just really stressed about my book right now. It needs to be finished, but finishing means admitting I couldn’t make it any better, and then the challenge of finding an agent begins, which is when I find out if those four years really taught me how to write a novel. And even if I do pull it off, I’ll have to figure out how to pull it off again. I am more scared about my writing now than I think I have ever been. It means so damned much to me.
OK, I think I needed to admit that.