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“You’ll Never Make Any Money Writing”
— and other anecdotes of the writing life
Before I claim to be something I’m not, I’ll let you know a little bit about my life as a writer: I began, like so many of you might have, with the words “you’re good at writing” from teachers as I was going through my elementary and high school years. Garnering even a few awards for essays I wrote, I thought it wasn’t such a bad thing to be praised and lauded just for putting words to paper in a meaningful way. It was, dare I say it, pretty easy back then. I can’t say I even ever really outlined unless an outline was required for an assignment.
I graduated high school over ten years ago with the starry-eyed ambition to finish and sell a novel by age twenty-five, and I am way past that idealistic deadline. I had my renaissance with writing during the great Young Adult boom that resulted in successes such as Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight saga and Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games trilogy. Clued in by those two phenomenons running back-to-back, I dabbled in supernatural romance and dystopian fiction — not necessarily because I loved those things but because I had seen the way those things sold in the publishing market. For instance, The Hunger Games helped pave the way for things like Divergent and The Maze Runner. If those books were published today, they likely would not have even been green-lit for their film…
