Yes, You Are Wasting Your Time As A Writer
Occasionally I get this request, either sent through to my email or from someone I just met: Hey, can you take a look at my story/book and tell me if I’m wasting my time as a writer? And, man, my heart aches every time I see that. I remember that stage of my career so fucking well, and it was hard. I made the decision to become a writer when I was fifteen or so. I stuck with it long past the point where it was sane, living on the kind of money that made my parents wince well into my late twenties. I took bad jobs, ’cause it meant I could work very little and write a whole lot. I wasn’t getting paid anywhere near enough from my writing to make that worthwhile, and the number of times I seriously thought about quitting… Well. It happened a lot. There were points where it was a god-damn weekly occurrence. I’d work at stories or poems or
