\n\n\n\nAs a genius writer I 100% consider myself capable of surgery. What, you’ve never heard of Ferdinand Demara?"}\n\n\n\n\nHonestly, I think the whole\u00a0\u201cdon\u2019t pay the writers\u201d thing boils down to the notion that everybody thinks they can write. It\u2019s the old saw about the novelist at a cocktail party having to hear someone say, for the millionth time,\u00a0\u201cI\u2019d love to write a book someday.\u201d
\nSomeone\u2013Stephen King? Pretty sure I saw this in a Stephen King foreword\u2013once said they\u2019d like to say to a brain surgeon,\u00a0\u201cBoy, I\u2019d love to do brain surgery someday.\u201d
\nWe treat\u00a0\u201cthe ability to put words into a sentence\u201d like it\u2019s just the same as\u00a0\u201cthe ability to form a coherent narrative that engenders a variety of emotions within the reader and puts them in a scene and shows them what they didn\u2019t see before\u201d.
\nAnd that\u2019s like me drawing a stick figure and saying I\u2019m an artist.
\nWriters are constantly\u00a0devalued because everyone thinks they have a book in them and don\u2019t realize the level of skill and commitment it takes to finish even a short story, much less a whole book.\u00a0
\nThis goes well beyond fandom, but man, I would\u2019ve hoped fandom would know better.
\n***REBLOGS AGGRESSIVELY***
\nAlso like this notion that writing is not a form of art? Stop that. Writing fiction is a form of art. A good book is like any other form of artwork. It stirs your emotions, it makes you connect to something, it fills some deep need inside you. It makes you feel things or opens your mind, or something.
\nIt\u2019s not art in the same way a painting or pottery or a marble sculpture is, but it is art none-the-less and deserves to be respected as such. Writers are artists, and it takes a lot of practice and effort to be able to write well.
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