by Joe Bunting |
I’ve been in San Francisco with my family this weekend. Needless to say we’re having a great time.
While San Francisco is a relatively young city, it has a storied history regarding the arts. Notably for writers, it was the home of the literary movement known as the Beat Generation in the 1950s.
The Beats included writers like poets William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg and novelists Jack Keruoac and Neal Cassady. Their motto was liberty of expression and their style has influenced writers for the last 60 years.
by Joe Bunting |
PRACTICE
The Mayans were right. The world ended today.
Write about the end of the world for fifteen minutes. When your time is up, post your practice in the comments section. And if you post, be sure to comment on a few practices by other writers.
by Joe Bunting |
Don’t you hate the feeling that you get when you stare at your blank computer screen or your fresh piece of paper, your hands above the keyboard, your pencil hovering above the paper, and you don’t know what to write? I sure do. But instead of sitting and staring, frozen with not a single idea of what to write, I get up, walk away, and get inspired.
by Joe Bunting |
What if you only had only one more day to write? What would you write?
This is the dilemma faced by Harry of Ernest Hemingway’s short story, “The Snows of Kilamanjaro.” We find Harry on his deathbed, plagued by the depression that his life will soon end. Yet, the thought that torments Harry most is that he will never be able to write all of the stories he has put off writing over the years.
by Joe Bunting |
Let’s take a look at the numbers:
– There are currently over 181 million blogs.
– Three million books were published in 2011. That’s one book for every 100 or so people in the US.
– The chances of getting your book published traditionally are somewhere between 5% and .1% (1 in 20 to 1 in a thousand).
– If you give up on a traditional publisher and decide to self-publish, the average self-published book sells somewhere between 20 and 100 copies.
For the aspiring writer, those are not great numbers to hear, and in the midst of that, you might wonder, “Does my story really matter?”
