Writing Books

[Clueless Morgan]

To me, writing is about expression - expressing whatever is in you that you feel you need to write down; it's cathartic as much as anything else*. Some people simply choose to publish (or try to publish) what they write. What's wrong with that? If it's crappy it'll get rejected, if it's good (or decent) it'll get published, and you've got a second income stream.

I agree that writing is a skill and an art that a lot of people don't bother to develop *coughstephaniemeyer* and because of that people have overblown opinions about their skill level, but if they're serious about it they can develop those skills.

I've mostly gotten out of fanfiction because of the sheer level of crapdom one has to wade through in order to find anything worth reading even the first chapter of. But I have found some authors that are truly talented, and what I've seen has been them graduating to original work and becoming published. And good for them.

*I've written a bit in my time, but it's more about getting ideas out of my head so I can stop thinking about them than about wanting to publish and get accolades and a second income stream. There's also the minor issue that I rarely finish something I'm writing, but more like write scenes and plot out a story and then the catharsis has been achieved and I move on. If I have a strength in writing, I think it lies in plotting rather than actually writing the scenes of the story out.