Are there any fellow writers here on S2KI (creative or otherwise)?
I'm an aspiring novelist/short story writer. I just finished my first novel and am already starting my second in a couple of weeks. I plan to revise the first this summer after I finish the second, and in between/randomly during I write short stories and try to send them out to magazines.
I've yet to get published, but have only tried a few magazines so far. My plan is next school year to have both novels revised as well as a dozen or so perfected stories and work on getting them all published before starting my third novel (which is already brewing in my mind).

So, are there any other aspiring/professional writers out there? I'm an English Lit. major, so it'd be cool if there were some other people who had gotten a BA in English and found a job other than teaching with it, as I'm looking for a safety net for when I get out of college in case my writing isn't making me a living by then.

p.s. If I do publish my novel and it picks up and becomes popular, you'll know it by the "I just purchased a 997 GT3" thread in the gallery

 

I'm a musician. After a 13 year hiatus, I started back playing Good 'Ol Rock N' Roll.

I'm now writing songs (never really did as a kid), and subsequently, am having to write poetry and prose. Ideally, I like the stuff to mean something, and sound better than normal top-40 drivel. Because of that, I'm having to take my time, and respect the writing process more than when I was just writing papers in college. My drummer loves my lyrics, but I'm in awe about him crafting perfect little pop songs.

As per my Edumacation, I have a B.M.Ed., but have managed to date a slew of English Majors of various degrees (pun intended).

 

i'm a writer.

not really... but it's the only thing i've ever really felt i've been truly good at. and even then, i don't know if i'm that good. sad?

i've told my friends i want to be a writer... like live off of being a writer. my friends tell me good luck and that they hope i like being poor. they ask: what will you write about? i dunno. my dad always wanted to be a writer and he ended up as a navy officer for 20 years and working for the bureau of land management for another 20. he's still not a writer... blehh.

 

Even though I'm a business major and have always been business-oriented, I did aspire to be a writer at one point in my life. Back in high school I would actually write some college papers for different older friends, just for kicks and to see what grades I

 

Drewchie is an awesome writer!

 

I would like to write. I have at least five detailed storylines in my head for fiction pieces, and one non-fiction idea. Characters, plot twists, blahbity blah. The problem? I cant draw stuff out long enough and have a tendency to shorten things up.

Off the top of my head here is a sample you might see in a fiction novel:

He glared intently at the back of his hand. The wrinkles an the age that it showed were not something he had noticed before. They seemed to appear as if from nowhere. In one of his first real moments of clarity, his first break from alcohol in twelve years, began to show him how he had aged.

He did not recognize the the face staring back at him in the mirror. He longed for the young and handsome face that he remembered, but only saw the broken face of man in his late thirties, that appeared to be a man close to fifty. At that moment he felt his own mortality and wept about all of the life he left at the bottom of a bottle.


No...not great writing for sure. But I basically said very little for two paragraphs. When trying to paint a picture in the readers mind, you have to go on forever about nothing. It becomes more like work and less like fun. I don't know how Hemingway did it. I can think of a great story, but would be better coming up with a summary of it then filling 200 pages. Too time consuming. If you enjoy it, more power to you and good luck with your first publishing deal.

 

[QUOTE=vader1,Feb 20 2007, 09:23 AM] I would like to write.

 

I'm starting to write again. I haven't for 2 years.

I was a philosophy maj./english minor, but didn't really get into english until my last year.

My writing was bland, and to some degree still is, because I tend to be too academic, too philosophical. I hated english (at the college level) at first. I think I hated the pretentious (although somewhat cute) girls in my class mostly.

Then I came in contact to the modern writers like gertrude stein and more exciting philosophers like the existentialists and postmodernists. I grew to love critical theory and english itself.

I've been writing off and on for about 7 years. I mostly write songs and poems, when I do write. I couldn't write a novel, maybe a short story here or there, but I don't feel the affinity to those as I do to music and poems.

I plan on going back into the "studio" (my bedroom) and just lock myself in there for hours at a time like I used to.

For a fallback, I might get my credential and become a english teacher but I already work at a high school as a assistant librarian.
I have a few english teacher buddies and most of them are stressed out.
I would much rather teach at a community college, but that would mean going back to school and entering a super competitive market. Eh.


I don't want to try to get rich with writing/music, my goal is to eventually produce artists, and perhaps get a song or arrangement in a movie or two and just try and make a living (comfortably).

 

Ha, kind of the opposite of me (English major/philosophy minor).
I've been "writing" for a couple of years, but didn't get really serious about it until last summer. I started off with short stories then a few months ago just commited to a novel. I'd put the page number I wanted to get to in my schedule book so I wouldn't slack on it, and it turned out really well. At the beginning, I was writing 2-4 pages a day. Towards the end, even with school/work taking up a lot of my time, I was writing 3-8 pages a day, and ended with 16 pages in one day to finish it up.
If you look at it as a whole a novel seems kind of daunting, which I think scares many people away, but if you take it one day at a time and just plan out a managable 3-10 pages a day it goes quicker and easier than you'd think.

 

i work in tv....you won't starve....trust me.

it's very lucrative....head writers can make upwards of $2,000,000 for being the head writer on a 26 episode series.

hell, even a junior story editor can make $250,000....easy.

TV/film is more about writing than directing and acting....you learn the value of these guys pretty quickly when you're in the biz.