can’t compete with cheat gpt anymore unless I inject lots of personal soul
Whatever Piers Anthony may have done in some circumstances, in other circumstances he was a nice guy, as I pointed out in a post in another thread:
This issue is extremely personal to me.
When I wrote my Robot book, I wound up researching and writing eight hours a day seven days a week for the last several months in order to make deadline. Like a lunatic, I also wrote and researched a separate biweekly robot column for an online magazine of topics that wouldn’t fit into the book. I did it because I love writing more than anything else I could ever do.
The love remains, but I couldn’t possibly exert that effort today, six years later. On a good day I can write and research an hour and a half, two hours tops. My brain doesn’t want to push any farther. I never write to deadline anymore; I publish online on my sites on a random schedule to please myself.
I will probably stop doing that as well in a few more years. Writing is hard. The energy that goes into sitting at a computer and typing is far more draining than appears on the outside. That energy goes into researching a topic (I do only nonfiction, but fiction also needs research), organizing the results to a coherent and attractive whole, composing sentences that do not sit flat upon the page, and constantly finding the right word choices. (I want a word that means x… I know that word, I’ve used it all my adult life, but it’s not there. In a day or two it will pop into my head when I’m not working, but for now… More and more frequently…)
I have to meet my own standards, which means that I have to successfully master every aspect of my craft. The result may not be brilliant or beautiful, but it has to be good, preferably very good. I labor at that goal today while I once could churn out a thousand word article in first draft that would turn out as good or better.
Much of this is due to age and health problems. I don’t know of an aging writer who doesn’t have health problems, many more serious than mine. Work is work. Working till you drop is not a life or a lifestyle.
A good analogy surrounds professional athletes. When young they can often make plays by sheer athletic ability. Their reflexes are superfast, their tendons superstretchy, their bodies do not ache miserably every day. A few older athletes can remain stars by substituting craft and experience, putting themselves in the proper places without having to use obsolete resources. But they all age out. Nobody likes to stumble around in public; they all retire except the few who die early.
Writers don’t like to stumble in public. All writing is public. Most readers never see anything but the words that writers put into public; they equate the words with their opinions of the person. That’s also why most writers hate the thought of their juvenilia being published, even after they die. Nobody except Kafka has ever not been diminished by work they didn’t want seen.
tl;dr Given the choice to stumble or stop, virtually everyone chooses to stop.
GRRM has kept writing, he’s just abandoned The Song of Fire and Ice.
Like everyone I guess he has his good days and his bad days. On his blog he confused Stephen R. Donaldson, the author, with Stephen Donaldson the activist, reporting on his (Anthony’s) blog that Stephen R. Donaldson was dead from AIDS, acquired by being raped in prison (this blog post is apparently no longer available, but it’s described here https://groups.google.com/g/rec.arts.sf.written/c/3WCHW0jLSjc). Anthony did not take correction well
This.
I’m a writer, but not fiction. My craft is legal writing. I know i’m good at it, but it’s getting harder, especially post-COVID (three bouts). It’s not long COVID, which can be debilitating, but my energy levels have certainly dropped.
I can answer for myself…
I am/was a comic book writer.
I had some deals fall through, a series I was working on got essentially killed because of issues with the artist and the publisher going through a management change, a book that I thought would be my big break…landed with a thud…
A second book in a series that my partner and I had just finished and was about to go to the artist…got cancelled by its publisher.
I was in a large comic shop one day and I just started to notice something that hit me… every shelf had a book by someone I knew personally–every section on every shelf, from indie to the big two… and halfway through the store I said “okay, if they don’t have one of my books in this store…I’m done. I’m ready to move on.”
They didn’t.
I haven’t felt compelled to work on anything since. (I have some already written stuff that might move forward…but nothing new).
There are some authors who have some very specific stories they want to tell and once those are done the urge to write passes. There are some authors who enjoy having written much more than actually writing - and once they they’ve gotten to the having-written stage, they can enjoy that without writing another word. Still other authors just have a hard time selling any more and don’t have the interest or aptitude to navigate independent publishing (it’s surprising how many authors who I think of as highly talented have gone to independently publishing - but that takes a different set of skills and not every author can do it).
As a still unpublished fiction writer, I would say yes, it’s incredibly hard work, and it’s emotionally exhausting. I’ve been writing since I could pick up a pen - except when I wasn’t. I stopped writing when I was in college, wrote for a while more, stopped writing in grad school, resumed writing in my early thirties, wrote for years, then COVID happened, I had a kid who needed intensive therapy and I didn’t write for two or three years because I just didn’t have the bandwidth. Now I’m struggling with some kind of long-COVID perimenopause thing, still writing, but it’s very hard. The simple answer is that your ability to produce work depends a lot on what’s happening in your life, and some people just get hammered.
I am friends with a lot of older writers. I have one currently writing books for bestselling authors that the authors get most of the credit for - looks exhausting, I don’t want my friend’s life. I have another in his 60s who stopped writing for the first time in his life. He’s battling cancer. Another made the unfortunate choice to start a restaurant. He’s barely hanging on.
But people who write have a hard time quitting. I suspect the authors you think stopped writing are still probably writing, they’re either not getting published or getting so deeply experimental they don’t think they’re gonna have a market for their stuff. I haven’t known any writer in my life who ever stopped writing for good. For a very healthy percentage of us, it’s who we are, and we can’t take that hit without a staggering loss of identity. Not to mention a dramatic uptick in therapy bills!
I ran into an old friend of mine awhile ago, also an appellate lawyer. He mentioned that he was thinking of retirement. I asked what he would do then? He said “Write the law articles I’ve always wanted to write!”
I guess some people treat it like a day job but there are a lot of us weird obsessives out there. Most of the writers I know are weird obsessives.
I think some people fall off because almost everything else is easier than writing. That’s the case for me, anyway. I write grants for a living and I’m highly successful at it. It’s embarrassing how easy grant writing is compared to writing fiction. I will spend the rest of my natural life mastering fiction. Everything rewarding I have ever done is easier than writing fiction, except raising a child, but even that is like, tied (so far.) They are similar in a lot of ways. You have to commit despite persistent setbacks, some days you feel you’re killing it and other days you feel totally incompetent, it’s gut-wrenching emotional labor interspersed with pure joy, and when you solve the problem, fix the issue, hit another milestone, it’s the most deeply satisfying experience imaginable.
Sometimes I don’t know why I put myself through it, but most times I’m just sorry I won’t get to do it forever.
Then you have Patrick Rothfuss who, with two books of a planned trilogy published, seems to have written himself into a corner with waaaaay too much to be done in the final book. Rather than admitting that it’s going to take more than 3 books to tell the story he appears to have given up.
Disappointing, as I greatly enjoyed the 1st 2 books and was looking forward to the completion of the story.
This is why I said to myself I would never publish a series until it was finished because I would like to avoid the psychological hell of having an unfinished book series and being unable to finish it. The problem is, it’s a complete waste of time to set up a series if you don’t know whether the first book is going to sell. They are discouraged for first-time authors for this reason.
I wrote short stories and novels and many other things, back in the day. Writing is often pleasurable work but it is real work. I put in a full day, every day, when I was doing that. And writing work is weird – you are all alone doing something you have no idea anyone will want to look at much less pay for. It’s easy to give up.
But mainly – and I’m speaking of creative writing here specifically – the qualities you need to make a creative work have nothing to do with the qualities you need to sell it. Almost nobody has both of them. Every artist I know struggled with the capitalism part of it. The hustle, selling yourself, hyping the book, running down all the leads, the many dead ends, the crass venality of the book publishing industry … lots of people give up trying. Or they develop a side hustle so they can write what they want to instead of what their agent/editor/publisher wants them to. It is nothing like a regular job.
This is certainly true for musicians too.
Brahms famously decided to stop composing when he was 57, only to change his mind a couple of years later. He went on to write some of his most beautiful pieces, like the Clarinet Trio op. 114, the Clarinet Quintet op. 115, and the piano pieces opp. 116-119. A most fortunate decision.
Edward Elgar mostly stopped composing after his wife died in 1920. Was he too consumed with grief…or had she actually been composing most of his music?