Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Everyone does not, in fact, have a book in them

theoutline.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 134 posts

Re: Everyone does not, in fact, have a book in them

#31

Post by paulpauper »

bartread wrote: post #12
syndacks wrote: post #6

>I put it like this: I have been running since I was about a year old. Almost 40 years! But I cannot for the life of me run a marathon. I am not physically capable of it, even though I can run a few miles in a row. Yes, you are. You just tell yourself that you are not. And yes, you can write a book. Whether it gets published or not is another story. I don't understand why someone whose job it is to find the next best…

Agreed. I could run a marathon if I put in the effort. The reason I "can't" is truthfully that I can't be arsed . If you want to run a marathon what you're saying is that you're happy for training for that marathon to take over your life for, probably, about a year, and I'm not motivated to do that. With that being said Eddie Izzard, with little training, ran 43 marathons in 51 days. He didn't break any records or wi…

But I could do it, because I've absolutely written a book's worth of words over the past few years.

It depends on the genre and if it's fiction or non-fiction. Non fiction, yes. But fiction is harder because of stylistic attributes and the fact it all has to connect. It's not like writing 300 300-word blog posts.

Re: Everyone does not, in fact, have a book in them

#32

Post by dasil003 »

paulpauper wrote: post #27
syndacks wrote: post #6

>I put it like this: I have been running since I was about a year old. Almost 40 years! But I cannot for the life of me run a marathon. I am not physically capable of it, even though I can run a few miles in a row. Yes, you are. You just tell yourself that you are not. And yes, you can write a book. Whether it gets published or not is another story. I don't understand why someone whose job it is to find the next best…

the reason why some ppl cannot run well is due to lactic acid buildup and VO2 max level. This means some people will cramp up and get exhausted no matter how hard they train or even if they lose weight. Similarly, with regard to writing, some people are simply not smart enough. If you didn't get a near-perfect score on the verbal part of the SAT, maybe fiction writing is not for you (but non-fiction is always a possi…

Performance on standardized testing is not a good measure of writing ability. It mostly has to do with hoop-jumping, a little bit to do with ability and nothing to do with motivation. Writing a novel is exactly the opposite: it requires a lot of motivation and a little bit of ability.

Re: Everyone does not, in fact, have a book in them

#33

Post by paulpauper »

ska wrote: post #29
paulpauper wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the reason why some ppl cannot run well is due to lactic acid buildup and VO2 max level. This means some people will cramp up and get exhausted no matter how hard they train or even if they lose weight. Similarly, with regard to writing, some people are simply not smart enough. If you didn't get a near-perfect score on the verbal part of the SAT, maybe fiction writing is not for you (but non-fiction is always a possi…

The overwhelming majority of people are capable of running a marathon distance, even if at a slow pace. Not perhaps today, but by working up to it in a very achievable way. Similarly, the overwhelming majority can produce a book length manuscript, even if it isn't particularly remarkable. Again, they may need to work up to it. In this, near-perfect verbal SAT is pretty much irrelevant.

But I mean a good marathon time, and getting a book accepted by a publisher, in which there is an advance and royalties (not self-publishing).

If by publishing you mean Amazon, then yeah, anyone can do that. Even robots can. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-kindle-spam/spam-c...

Re: Everyone does not, in fact, have a book in them

#34

Post by learc83 »

paulpauper wrote: post #27
syndacks wrote: post #6

>I put it like this: I have been running since I was about a year old. Almost 40 years! But I cannot for the life of me run a marathon. I am not physically capable of it, even though I can run a few miles in a row. Yes, you are. You just tell yourself that you are not. And yes, you can write a book. Whether it gets published or not is another story. I don't understand why someone whose job it is to find the next best…

the reason why some ppl cannot run well is due to lactic acid buildup and VO2 max level. This means some people will cramp up and get exhausted no matter how hard they train or even if they lose weight. Similarly, with regard to writing, some people are simply not smart enough. If you didn't get a near-perfect score on the verbal part of the SAT, maybe fiction writing is not for you (but non-fiction is always a possi…

I got a near perfect score on the verbal part of the SAT, but I don't see how good reading comprehension and a large vocabulary are particularly important to being a good storyteller. Reading comprehension is mostly about subject knowledge and vocabulary is something you can learn.

If you can craft an engaging story and you have the motivation to write, an editor (or a thesaurus) can help with vocabulary.

Re: Everyone does not, in fact, have a book in them

#35

Post by Avshalom »

tbirrell wrote: post #7
Avshalom wrote: post #2

s/book/good book/

IDK, I'd have trouble stringing together enough words to even qualifies for book-length status.

Nah, you'd have trouble stringing together enough words that make sense. Joyce threw a typewriter down some stairs for a month and now we all hail Finnegan's Wake as a master piece.

Re: Everyone does not, in fact, have a book in them

#37

Post by paulpauper »

dasil003 wrote: post #32
paulpauper wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the reason why some ppl cannot run well is due to lactic acid buildup and VO2 max level. This means some people will cramp up and get exhausted no matter how hard they train or even if they lose weight. Similarly, with regard to writing, some people are simply not smart enough. If you didn't get a near-perfect score on the verbal part of the SAT, maybe fiction writing is not for you (but non-fiction is always a possi…

Performance on standardized testing is not a good measure of writing ability. It mostly has to do with hoop-jumping, a little bit to do with ability and nothing to do with motivation. Writing a novel is exactly the opposite: it requires a lot of motivation and a little bit of ability.

I would posit that the vast majority of fiction writers test well, but very few people who test well become writers.

Re: Everyone does not, in fact, have a book in them

#38

Post by jeffwass »

paulpauper wrote: post #28
jeffwass wrote: post #13

The article title is actually “No, you probably don’t have a book in you”. But the intended meaning of the article is more like “no, you probably don’t have a bestselling book in you.” Disclaimer - I’ve written a kids sci-fi novel in the past year. Something I’ve been meaning to do for awhile now, and finally got around to actually putting down the words on the page to make it happen. Now it’s one thing to say “I wro…

I’d want them to encourage more people to write that story they’ve been thinking about on the train. Can you imagine if JK Rowling heard this and just thought, “she’s right, my story probably sucks, better to just focus on my day job.” The fact ppl keep using her as an example of persistence paying off, if evidence of how rare it is.It's good to have realistic expectations.

I’m not using JK Rowling as an example of persistence here.

She’s my example of a novice author who started with nothing more than an idea, a story she wanted to tell, and wound up writing a game-changing series.

Re: Everyone does not, in fact, have a book in them

#39

Post by asdfman123 »

bmer wrote: post #30
CPLX wrote: post #11

It's actually possible almost everyone, or at least a great many people, have a good book in them. The hard part I would think is getting it out of them. It takes work and practice. I've been a professional writer for much of my life, in the sense that for periods of time I've actually been able to eat and pay NYC rent by virtue of people paying me to write things. But I don't know if I have a book in me. Because eve…

> But I don't know if I have a book in me. Because every time I try to write things that could possibly turn into a book I read them and they don't sound very good. I know what I'd have to do to change that, namely write a lot every day for a few years until it clicked. But I don't. Could you expand on what you mean by this? problem: you write down something, but it doesn't sound very good solution: write a lot every…

Because to get good at anything, you need to do a whole lot of it.

You probably have to write a few bad books before writing a good one.

Re: Everyone does not, in fact, have a book in them

#40

Post by [deleted] »

bmer wrote: post #30
CPLX wrote: post #11

It's actually possible almost everyone, or at least a great many people, have a good book in them. The hard part I would think is getting it out of them. It takes work and practice. I've been a professional writer for much of my life, in the sense that for periods of time I've actually been able to eat and pay NYC rent by virtue of people paying me to write things. But I don't know if I have a book in me. Because eve…

> But I don't know if I have a book in me. Because every time I try to write things that could possibly turn into a book I read them and they don't sound very good. I know what I'd have to do to change that, namely write a lot every day for a few years until it clicked. But I don't. Could you expand on what you mean by this? problem: you write down something, but it doesn't sound very good solution: write a lot every…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN