Writer's Block

Why write, anyway? People get very stroppy about writing, when its
good or its bad, or they didn't do, or they could have done that if
they had felt like it. Everyone wants to be a writer. Everyone is a
writer. But why?

You won't be heard out of writing. The reading of books has been in
decline since the war. Your editor, if you are lucky enough to get
published, will hack and slash your fine felt sentiments to fit the
market. What every hugely important point that you would have wanted to
make would be lost.

You don't make money out of writing. This is how it works. In this
country at least. For starters, the market for books have been rigged
against the consumer since the war too, book prices have been fixed.
This isn't true of other countries, where cartel becomes subsidy in
some cases, and somehow this shows in the vibrancy of the market. There
has traditionally been a bias against learning and being an
intellectual in this country, which is why your books won't sell in
Britain, whatever. Your average Finnish bookshop though, will carry
books in all major European languages, no struggling to Grant and
Cutler in W1, perhaps because the literacy rate in Finland is 100\%.
Your average Italian taxi driver will be able to quote philosophy at
you, and in France you don't have to be gay to do the same, you just
have to to go into Higher Education.

You probably won't even get read. Distributors of books started putting
a printing mill at one end of their warehouses and a pulping plant at
the other in the 90s. Which begs the question, if most of the contents
of their warehouses was going to get remaindered, why bother? They
were, of course, providing a service to the publishers, for which they
got paid, which justified the exercise. Publishers being such winners.
Faber and Faber, I think it was, having survived for a long time just
on its royalties from the Andrew Lloyd Weber show, Cats.

If you want to have your words of wisdom much read, the way to make
money for your brilliant or mediocre effort, is to get bought by
libraries and put on university reading lists. In this country, the
former is a waste of time, as the budget for libraries has been
endlessly slashed for years. As far as the later goes, it means doing
unsavoury things to academics. Ew, gag me with a spoon.

It isn't worth the pain.