To Write or Not To Write

By Bill Stephens - Feb 18 , 2008

As a restaurant consultant, I offer my SYFY package to anyone who’s never worked in a restaurant and says, “I’ve always wanted a restaurant.”

Briefly put, for $25,000.00 I Will Save You From Yourself (SYFY). For that fee, paid up front, I will talk you out of going into the restaurant business and save your marriage, a year of your life, and about $250,000.00. The failure rate of inexperienced ownership in the restaurant business is greater than two out of three.

Even coming from this background, I am still amazed at the host of mankind that glibly says, “I’ve always wanted to write.” When someone finds out I’m a writer, the “IAWTW” (I’ve Always Wanted To Write) comment just spills out.

My standard response now is, “Well, why don’t you?”

I mean, come on! You don’t need a license to write. It doesn’t take huge cash investment. About the only necessity is a masochistic nature that loves rejection.

Think about how easy it is to “write” today, using computers stuffed with word processor programs, spell checkers, grammar programs, and write-by-number programs. And then we have the Internet, which puts research at our fingertips, right there in our bedrooms.

Compare this to Charles Dickens, who wrote thousands of pages using only a feather quill and ink well. Or Hemingway who, I’m told, wrote 385 words per day on a tablet with a pencil.

It’s just no biggie, so start writing—or quit talking about it.

I don’t know to whom I should attribute these statistics, but recently I read on the Internet that only 3 in 1,000 writers ever get published. Of those who are lucky enough to get published, only 1 in 10 ever makes enough money to call it “a living.”

Let me run the numbers for you. That computes to a 0.03% chance that you will succeed financially as a writer. That’s right up there with the chance of getting struck by lightning. You have to have a super ego to buck those odds!!!

Don’t let these statistics discourage you, though, because we writers are told that we should not be writing for crass fame and fortune. Instead, we should be writing, “Because we can’t not write” – whatever that means (and whatever happened to the taboo on double negatives?). The Internet that provides so much research potential, also provides enormous opportunities for writer’s succor with its thousands of websites and blogs brimming with “how to” and “hand holding” for Writer Wannabees (WW).

So the question then becomes, “To write or not to write?”

My gut feeling is you might do better going into the restaurant business.