Write a Novel and Make a Fortune!

So many people dream of being novelists. The dream is perfectly understandable: You transfer your fantasies from your brain to a blank page, an agent snatches up your masterpiece, publishers fight over it until you decide which hefty advance to accept, and before you know it your bank account is a whole lot healthier and you get to meet Oprah. This actually happens once in a while, just often enough to keep the dream alive.

Oh, if only it were that easy. Writing is hard work. Writing well is even harder, and writing something people will pay money to read is harder still. Fame and fortune will not fall into your lap just because you have finally finished your novel. Trust me on this.

And that brings me to the actual subject of this post, which is: If you can’t get rich and famous writing novels, why bother to write at all?

My answer: If you’re writing a novel solely in pursuit of fame and fortune, you need to go do something else. I think there is only one reason to write fiction (or any form of creative writing), and that is that you feel compelled somehow to do so. If putting words together into stories or poems brings you deep satisfaction, or if writing is how you make sense of your life, you are a writer; you may not ever earn a dime from your writing, but you are still a writer. Material success is not the point. The finished product is not even the point. The point of writing is writing—it’s the process that matters, the things you discover along the way.

None of that means that material success is a bad thing. Hey, I wouldn’t mind having people read and enjoy my writing, and I certainly wouldn’t object to having a healthier bank account. I would prefer to skip the whole fame-and-fortune thing though. Honestly, riches don’t impress me, and if I suddenly became J. K. Rowling and had to read my work to an auditorium full of excited children I would vomit and/or wet my pants. Who wants that?

Most of us will never write a bestseller or be on Oprah. Our adoring fans won’t wait in line for our autograph. That’s okay—we’ll keep on writing, because we’re writers.