The world started getting really terrible around Trump’s first term and I just kept getting more and more depressed. I went from blogging a couple times a week to once a month to not at all.

I was mainly a reporter and photojournalist. The pay often sucks, the stress is high, the workload is often ridiculous, and the competition is cut throat. Also, they expect you to fill all sorts of different roles at a lot of places (you aren’t just a photojournalist, you’re also a video editor, copy editor, fact checker, writer, etc.) because they claim they can’t hire more staff (even though the assholes at the top are making crazy amounts of money relative to what they pay staff).

I mostly worked for newspapers and a few magazines doing photography, editing, and writing with a dash of video. You can get by, especially if you sell out, but mostly it’s a miserable, thankless job for shit pay and tons of stress. It wasn’t really worth the occasional cool experiences when I couldn’t support my family very well. I work in tech now, making a living wage.

I consider myself a writer, but don’t make much money from it (I make money elsewhere). Does that count?

Like most things that are not directly related to “productivity” specifically aligning with the current demands and whims of the economy, it’s difficult finding a way to make a decent income in the field, much less have a stable job with insurance benefits etc.

Not really trying to become a writer, but I have lots of worldbuilding ideas that I wish I could make interesting to others. I wish I could draw, but there’s a hard limit to what I can do visually, so I’ve had to fall back to writing, sort of. I like writing short character interactions or even just descriptions of an environment, the sort of stuff people would draw.

I agree with all of this. I worked for 10 years as a technical writer (I wanted to be a novelist but bad luck and poor self-control and executive dysfunction prevented me from ever really publishing anything noteworthy). For one thing, actually working as a writer kinda killed the drive for me. I still write for myself, but I have no real aim to get published—in large part because I know very few would ever read anything I wrote, simply because very few people still read. I’m currently shifting careers to something that AI won’t be able to swipe from me, and I’ve honestly been enjoying it a lot more than I ever enjoyed writing, though I loved studying English in school. Working as a writer is just not the same thing as going to school for writing. Working as a writer is just being told to write assignments you don’t really have any interest in day in and day out.

If you don’t do it every day or on a regular basis, you lose the drive.

Also, between AI, fan fiction, and social media, no one from the newer generations is reading original hand written fiction anymore. Some are, I’m sure, but most of, say, Stephen King’s Constant Readers are Boomers, Gen X, and Millennials. Looking at Gen Z and later, they know who Stephen King is, but most of them don’t care. They’ll watch a Stephen King movie, but never care about the book. And that’s Stephen King. One is the world’s biggest and most prolific writers (and my favorite) isn’t getting new readers. So how do you think the little guys are faring?

If you wanna write to write and not get paid and have a few people read it, write fan fiction and publish it on Ao3. If you wanna write original stuff, write fan fiction and convert, like what happened with Fifty Shades (it was originally Twilight fan fiction). Even still, it’s rare that that’s profitable.

Our society is illiterate. No one reads.

This timeline is more batshit crazy than anything I can come up with and I only enjoy writing batshit crazy stuff.

Personally, i lack executive function and self discipline. I used to read 3 or 4 books a month and write for a minimum amount of time every day, which usually went much longer. I have one published short from my time in college, then i graduated and started working. What focus and motivation I had evaporated with my free time as I now had to balance a dozen competing priorities. I still regularly have new ideas for plots, scenes, characters, and beats, but ten years later I’m between jobs and so burnt out I’d rather just sleep, game, and hang out with my dog. I’ve justified a lot of it to myself by saying “I need to experience more” before i can do whatever story justice, which is just an excuse. I only need to practice more. I’m certainly trying to start it up again.

But fuck, man, I’m so tired lol

I tried to write a SF novel decades ago. I stopped 300 pages in because I re-read what I wrote and it was awful.

Some people are talented at writing. I’m not one of them. The key to realizing whether you are or not is to let a good amount of time pass after you wrote something, then re-read it critically as if you were reading someone you never read before: if you find it boring, you can be 100% certain it’ll be boring to everybody else.

And you have to be willing to acknowledge that you suck at writing too, which is not terribly pleasant.

But I take comfort in knowing that in this day and age, when people can’t read anything without being told how many minutes it will take until their ADD kicks in beforehand, and AI debasing the arts everywhere, I’d be even sadder to be a good writer who can’t make a living out of it anymore.

I write fiction like I would write technical documentation or a police report. Nobody would want to read that.