I’ve officially given up trying to help most people with writing because they don’t want any help. They just want comforting platitudes and I’m not going to blow smoke up anyone’s skirt.

So, effective immediately, I’m retiring from online writing forums. It’s just not worth my time.

 

I know I’ve said it before, how I am sick and  tired of the overly-emotional throwing their childish temper tantrums because they can’t get what they want. Never mind that they have absurdly unrealistic expectations, all they care about are their fee-fees.

Sorry, I’m no longer playing along.

So this time, it happens over on Facebook on a group dedicated to publishing. Not just random writers, people who are either published, or actively interested in being published. Yet even there, we have these idiot children.

This is supposed to be a support group, in other words, if you have questions, other people with more experience and hopefully have had success, they will try to answer. You get to learn from the expertise of others. Sounds great, right?

But no, far too many people will ask questions and if they don’t get the answer that they want, usually a completely unrealistic answer that isn’t going to get them anywhere, they scream and they cry and call people names because… “you’re not being supportive!”

I think you’re missing the point.

See, here’s the thing. If you are published, or want to be published, and this  goes for self-publishing as well as traditional publishing, you’ve left the realm of “I really like to write” and moved into a business. You need to understand that what you’re writing, it isn’t all about you anymore. It’s about finding an audience, understanding their needs and their wants, so that you can convince them to part with some of their hard-earned money in exchange for whatever it is that you’re writing. Some people can do this successfully and, sadly, a lot of people can’t. That’s kind of the point of a group like that. The people who can help the people who can’t so they get better.

Yet far too often, the people who can’t don’t want to improve. They want reality to change for them. Sorry, that’s not how this works. These people, they don’t understand what it is that they’re trying to do. They think they get to write whatever nonsense they want, no matter how bad, and money is just magically going to fall out of the sky. That’s not realistic. They think that if they write it, money will come and that’s not how it works. That’s why Field of Dreams is a fantasy. You can’t just upload a bunch of garbage, no editing, no marketing, amateur cover and all, to Amazon and expect a paycheck in the mail. It doesn’t work that way. Writing is hard work and getting that book in front of the people that you want to see it, that’s even harder. Yet the moment that you reveal that nugget of truth to people, they scream and they cry and they insist that they’re being attacked because… well… it doesn’t make them happy. “I can’t afford to market!” Okay, but that doesn’t change anything. Marketing isn’t optional. “I can’t afford to get a professional cover or editing!” Then maybe, at this point in your life, you can’t afford to write for publication. That doesn’t mean you can’t write, but publication has an entirely different  set of standards. Your wishes and your dreams don’t change the objective state of reality. Life isn’t fair. Get it through your head.

I am tired of having to pussyfoot around these people with emotional problems. Keep in mind that nothing that I say is “mean”. It’s just true. It’s advice and you are welcome to take it or not. Lots of people provide lots of advice and you can accept whatever of it you like, or none of it at all. However, they seem to expect that everyone is going to offer comforting platitudes that don’t actually lead to success, they just want smoke blown up their skirt so that everything works out the way they want it to.

That doesn’t work either.

That tends to lead to people screaming “but you’re mean!” It’s not mean to point to reality. “You’re attacking me!” No, I’m telling you the truth. That you reject reality doesn’t mean you get to substitute your own and get anywhere. This is not how people used to act. In the past, people used to hear the truth and say “I guess I have to work harder.” Now, it’s “you expect me to do anything I don’t like? What’s wrong with you?”

Another example just cropped up though. Over on Reddit, someone asked how a realistic space-based invasion of a planet would work. I, and other people, asked them to define their terminology because, once you have FTL, fighting over land is likely to go away. There are more than a billion Earth-type planets in the Milky Way galaxy alone. Why are you doing this? If it’s just to kill an enemy and you don’t care about the planet, then orbital bombardment is the way to go. Forget all of the ships, just drop a couple of mile-long asteroids on the planet and walk away. It only took one 6-mile asteroid to wipe out the dinosaurs and drill a 12-mile deep hole in the planet, drop 50 of them. If you can move faster than the speed of light, you can certainly figure out how to attach engines to a rock.

Of course, the guy didn’t like that. He was looking for some cool-factor, but he was asking about reality. In reality, having a gigantic space fleet for warfare is stupid. So, he starts down voting everyone who didn’t tell him what he wanted to hear and changing his story. You’ll notice this happens a lot with these people. Now, he’s got a lot of new information to add, something he never bothered with in his initial post. Sorry, you can’t expect people to give you a decent answer when you can’t even provide decent information. Pretty much everyone gave up on this idiot after that. I can’t say I blame them.

So yeah, I think I’m finally done, at least unless I can find a place that only caters to adults and serious writers and that seems to be impossible these days. I heard from someone recently, someone I met a couple of years ago, who just left their in-person writer’s group. They’d really only started getting together again recently after the pandemic and she was shocked at how whiny people had become. No longer could you offer honest criticism of their work, they’d just scream and kick their feet and stomp out. They don’t want to get better, they want to be told how wonderful they already are. They want validation, not help.

Sorry, I don’t want to help you people anymore. It’s a complete waste of my time. Excuse me, I’ve got to get back to writing. I’m 8 days into a new novel and I just crossed 48k. Some of us actually have things to do.