Honestly, I think the whole “don’t pay the writers” thing boils down to the notion that everybody thinks they can write. It’s the old saw about the novelist at a cocktail party having to hear someone say, for the millionth time, “I’d love to write a book someday.”
Someone–Stephen King? Pretty sure I saw this in a Stephen King foreword–once said they’d like to say to a brain surgeon, “Boy, I’d love to do brain surgery someday.”
We treat “the ability to put words into a sentence” like it’s just the same as “the 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’t see before”.
And that’s like me drawing a stick figure and saying I’m an artist.
Writers are constantly devalued because everyone thinks they have a book in them and don’t realize the level of skill and commitment it takes to finish even a short story, much less a whole book.
This goes well beyond fandom, but man, I would’ve hoped fandom would know better.
***REBLOGS AGGRESSIVELY***
You want to write a book “one day”?
Great!
The average novel is 120 000 words. You can do it in ten months at 3K per week. Go to it!
(via meefling)