Face it: when you start an essay talking about how your first book deal got a $150,000 advance and you end with “And I wait. And I wait,” you’re pretty much holding yourself up to a hailstorm of japery and rotten tomatoes. And deservedly so. Writers’ careers are full of ups and downs (ask Doug Clegg), years of disappointment and dashed hopes, because the marketplace is so wildly unpredictable and writing for a living is such a counterintuitive, unadvisable act of financial planning…by our own admission. Yes, it’s erratic. Yes, it’s full of smashed ambition and demolished expectation. Anybody who reads anything about the industry knows that. But I don’t buy completely buy this essay as a valuable reality check for aspiring writers (whoever they are), for a couple reasons. First, because it sounds too much like I’m on the receiving end of somebody’s therapy session, and second of all, even if it were nothing more than a simple recitation of diminishing returns, it’s one writer’s experience, designed to do what? Discourage other writers from trying a novel? Provide fodder for boring, depressing cocktail parties? Confirm our most paranoid fears about the Future of Literature?

As you said, writers will keep on writing, and everybody else won’t. Some of us have even ghostwritten celebrity bios of our own. Who knows, maybe Jane Austen Doe and I both worked on the Jesse Ventura autobiography…

I just ranted on this over at Aaron Polson’s blog this morning, so I’ll link instead of repeating. But the thesis is, essentially: regardless of what happens to the ivory towers in Manhattan, storytellers-as-capitalists have been working their craft since prehistory, and there isn’t anything short of armageddon that is going to stop it now. We’ll just have to learn to become better hunters instead of relying exclusively on trade for our bison haunches.