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

91–100 of 134 posts

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

#91

Post by jdietrich »

ALittleLight wrote: post #87
jdietrich wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Yes, you are. You just tell yourself that you are not. Eeesh. Any able-bodied person can walk a marathon, given sufficient motivation. You might be able to run parts of it, but you can't run a marathon through sheer force of will if you haven't done the training. A book is technically just a bunch of bound pages, so anyone can write one in the loosest sense of the word. I can just type the word "beige" 80,000 times…

I think "if you haven't done the training" is the operative phrase. Similarly nobody could write a novel if they hadn't learned to write, or read enough, etc. If a healthy person wants to run a marathon they will be able to by a process of training. The original metaphor is a bit off. Anyone who puts in the effort could write fifty thousand words on the same theme or plot. Likewise anyone could complete a marathon wi…

>A better comparison would be writing a novel that people would pay to read, and completing a marathon so quickly that people would pay you to do it.

It's not merely a case of writing something that someone would pay to read, but writing something that someone would read at all. That's a considerably lower hurdle, but one that many authors never vault. Every day, the slush piles of publishers swell with lovingly-crafted novels that will, in all likelihood, never be read by anyone.

The parallel I might draw is with a singer so dreadfully tone deaf that their neighbours lodge a complaint, or a comedian so bad that they are booed off stage at an open-mic night. Most first-time novelists are precisely that awful - their work is not merely of insufficient quality to attract a paying audience, but actively repellent. Few budding authors are prepared for that level of disappointment.

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

#92

Post by Johnny555 »

I think this author has the misconception that people only write to be successful, others, like you, write for their own reasons.

I had a relative who once wrote a book about her life, honestly the book was not very good (both the writing style and content), and largely "sold" (or was given away to) only to family (despite her paying for a book run out of her own pocket and shopping it around to bookstores on her own)

Yet she was immensely proud of her book, which she spent years of her life on. As well she should be, while the book didn't meet any commercial success, it had been a longtime goal for her and she told her story to people who otherwise wouldn't have know about it.

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

#93

Post by ryan-allen »

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…

In the greater scheme of things, as long as you can get it self-published and archived somewhere meaningful (which is not particular difficult as far as I know), maybe 300 years from now when you're dead and buried maybe your audience will find you.

A number of famous composers were not 'successful' in their time, same with painters, same with some writers (A Confederacy of Dunces comes to mind), later after their death they gained acclaim.

I think the mere act of creation and distribution of art is the goal in itself, and with technology you can keep it around for a long time.

To say something isn't popular doesn't mean it's not good. In 200 years conservatories of music are not going to be talking about Taylor Swift despite her engineered success, who knows who they'll be talking about!

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

#94

Post by ben_w »

T-A wrote: post #85
ben_w wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Charlie Stross detailed this in a blog post (which I can’t easily find). Basically, printing a book is easy in comparison to editing, typesetting, and marketing.

This? http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/03/why-i-do...

No, but following that link manged to help me find the correct one, so thanks anyway: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/02/cmap-2-...

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

#95

Post by btrask »

CPLX wrote: post #44
bmer wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The problem is a lack of skill. The solution is lots of practice.

It seems to me that you are already a good writer.

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

#96

Post by Finnucane »

I think what this person is trying to say is, please do not send me your book. And I kind of get it. I've had to read slush, I've rejected many thousands of manuscripts. You get to your desk in the morning, and every day there's another stack of envelopes (in those days it was all paper). You spend an hour sending it all back where it came from. Virtually all of it completely hopeless. Once in a great while there's something with some potential. The thing about slush is not that most of it is particularly bad, it's particularly nothing at all.

A lot of people do have a book in them. Unfortunately, it's not much different from the other 20 or so that arrived the same day.

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

#97

Post by ghaff »

ska wrote: post #46
paulpauper wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I guess my point was that success in these things at a reasonable (i.e. definitely not expert ) level has far more to do with perseverance than "natural" talent or physiological characteristics - you seemed to be suggesting that the latter has far more to do with it than it really does. Neither of them are out of the normal range of human capability the way, say running a 10s 100m is. People consistently underestimat…

>I belive most people could write a book that a significant number of people they didn't already know would pay to read (this may fall well below the numbers that would make a publisher interested)

What's mostly missing from this discussion is marketing. Sorry, but even pretty good books will languish on Amazon (which is mostly what matters) if you just put a book out there, fiction or non-fiction, with the attitude that "If you build it, they will come." (Like most everything else.)

Unless you're a known quantity for other reasons, even getting accepted by a publisher is a tough slog and there is a long list of stories of publishers (like studios) passing on blockbusters. Not that getting in with a major publisher is any guarantee of success but cultivating a fan base as a total independent self-publishing is that much harder.

(In addition, as someone who does a lot of writing and editing, you're also probably optimistic about the abilities of said random person.)

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

#98

Post by ghaff »

learc83 wrote: post #65
paulpauper wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

generally, good writers are good readers. Competent writers have a varied vocabulary which does not come across as forced (which is often the case when someone relies on a thesaurus). I don't think too many are surprised that mathematicians get perfect scores on the math part of the SAT, so I dunno why writers scoring equally well on the verbal is different. Yeah obv. being a mathematician is a lot more involved than…

>I don't think vocab can be taught. The reason is, vocab is very highly correlated with IQ, which is stable thought life and cannot be boosted. The fact that IQ and vocabulary are correlated across a population doesn't imply that, and it's clearly not true unless you don't think someone can learn a new language later in life. Or you think that a person can learn 10k new words in a new language, but not an extra few t…

Especially for a lot of day-to-day writing about technical topics, ornate writing with long sentences, complicated punctuation, and SAT words is mostly discouraged. I'll slip a non-basic word in here and there but I generally keep my writing relatively short and sweet--and my editors tend to steer it in that direction as well to its benefit.

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

#99

Post by whatshisface »

dvtrn wrote: post #86
saulrh wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell that to my knees. I'm mostly fine walking around. I can even do short flights of stairs. In fact, up until a few years ago they only bothered me when I sat in a really unergonomic chair for a while. Then someone convinced me to try this "couch to 5k" thing, and said that literally anyone could do it, and that I liked like I weighed maybe half as much as people that'd actually followed the timetable and gone from…

Tell that to my knees Almost came here with this exact same comment. Absolutely not amount of motivation or feel good thinking about my own capabilities and willingness to 'do the damn thing' can surmount the sheer agony and pain I feel after a 2 mile run (because that's the most I can bear to stand) after years of jumping out of airplanes for a living (US Military) over 12 years. Ever have your knee shattered to pie…

The motivational quotes are told to people because for every ex-paratrooper or person with naturally bad knees, there are hundreds of people with perfectly fine health that they're neglecting or abusing. Being a paratrooper is almost as uncommon as being lazy is common. People with chronic health problem just end up caught in the crossfire between lazy people telling each other to work harder.

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

#100

Post by ghaff »

alister wrote: post #84

> I'm often sent stories that are way too long or too short for the publishing industry. The average novel is at least 50,000 words. I find it fascinating that there are sweet spots for the length of an economically successful book (50,000 words), movie (90-120 minutes), or song (3 minutes). For whatever reason, even collections of short films packaged together as a feature-length movie are rarely successful. Likewis…

philg wrote this about 10 years ago. https://philip.greenspun.com/writing/changed-by-web-and-webl...

But, yeah, the economics of publishing (even in digital) still basically require you to pad a book out to about 200 pages or so even if the topic could fit more into 100 and be more focused as a result.

You do see shorter books coming out from the likes of O'Reilly but a lot of those are sponsored by companies as giveaways. And, if you self-publish, you can do anything you like. But there still seems to be a general attitude that it's not a "real" book unless it's 200 pages.

Post reply on HN