Three writers

Think how great it would be to be able to make a living by writing fiction. All you'd need is paper, a pen or pencil, and your mind. The other devices—computers and stuff—are superfluous, really, if what you write is good enough. Yes, you would have to get your manuscript typed for a publisher to take you seriously, but that's a failing on the publisher's part; there weren't commercially successful typewriters until the 1880s. The first author of note to use one to write on was Mark Twain. It's not like no one wrote anything good before then.

I've never known a successful fiction writer. The only people I've known who write for a living have been journalists, and the ones I knew weren't freelance but nine-to-fivers like I was, who filled out time sheets and got yelled at by bosses.
I've known or known of three people who wanted to be writers, though. All three tried and failed. Here they are, with names changed:
D.C., a guy I knew of in college
He was so passionate about writing that even though my school was small and he was my year (class of 1981) and he didn't join a frat and disappear like guys who joined frats often did, we never met. He spent his time reading and writing and only socializing with others who shared his interest. Friends who knew him pointed him out to me. He didn't do anything for the school newspaper; journalism wasn't his interest. He worked hard for the college literary magazine, which was published twice a year, helping produce it. He became its editor when he was a senior, which meant he got a cool room in a college building with just three rooms for students in it. He wrote but didn't want to publish in it. Finally, his senior year, he published a short story in the spring edition. The story was, to me, uninteresting. Something about a young man in the South, which is where D.C. was from, and his troubled

relationship to his family. It was written well enough and probably had a solid formal structure, but there was nothing about it that would make me want to seek out more of what he wrote. The only thing I can find about his writing career now is that he edited a book of three classic French comedies. The plays were translated by someone else, who is credited as the book's author. The book was published in 1996.
Melissa, a woman I knew in 2010
She worked at the art museum store I worked at too. Melissa had gone to Sarah Lawrence College, a liberal arts college north of New York City. She was a recent graduate and working at the store which I managed after years as a cashier. Melissa didn't seem to like me. I wondered if I'd said or done something wrong. I got along well with other staffers her age and had even gone to three of their weddings over the years and remain in touch with still others. A few weeks after she'd been there I noticed that she only talked to a few of her coworkers and they were all her age. She had applied to the Iowa Writers' Workshop but didn't get in. After working at the store she got a job in the office of a retail chain and is still there.
Matt, a guy I've known since the mid 1990s
He'd always wanted to write a novel and read seriously, worked as a copyeditor, and had been a reporter at a suburban weekly like I had. He knew tons about writers and the writing process. He had a manuscript going that was based largely on his life, job, and marriage, as I'm sure many novels are. He showed a printed first chapter of it to me

when he was feeling suicidal and asked if I thought it was any good. I thought it was and told him so. Like me, he was single and we agreed to get together weekly for dinner at a diner near him and Skype once during the week. I'd been laid off by the art museum and I was looking for work and he needed someone to vent to about his problems writing. He had software meant for writers that tracked the progress of what they were writing. How many words a day, which draft, when it would be completed at the pace it was going. As the weeks passed, he'd show me on screen while we were Skyping spreadsheets and charts and graphs of his progress. As the weeks passed, there were more blanks and the curves leveled and then descended. He spent hours refining a poster with motivational slogans on it he'd found online, changing the fonts and typefaces. After five weeks or so we stopped Skyping and I'd let him bring it up when we had dinner. He never did. We had a falling out in 2016 and haven't gotten together since.   
About the three
I'm not qualified to have anything other than a personal opinion about these three, but that's true of everyone, though professional writers would have more valid opinions than I do. 
D.C. and Melissa were too busy trying to be writers to do what good writers do, which is interact with other people. Even writers who write about themselves write best when writing about themselves interacting with others. D.C. and Melissa cloistered themselves from other people. That's like mining for gold by just looking at the surface of a gold mine. I wouldn't be surprised if their fiction was kind of thin. They didn't want to write action novels but may have been better off if they had.
Matt was like me; a dreamer, though my dreams were of other ambitions. He wanted to be a published author but couldn't force his ass into a chair and do the work needed to do so. I never understood why and I'm sure he never did either. He knew the business well enough to know that rejection was a common thing that would happen and he knew that you just have to keep plugging away despite it. This aspect of his life was complicated so I can't guess what happened. I hope he's all right.
I may be wrong about all three or one or two of them. Maybe they've all got brilliant work that's nearly ready to publish. D.C. and Matt are about my age, though, so it's statistically unlikely. But who knows?

A Craigslist ad

This is an ad for writers. No kidding. 

Children's Letters to the Loser #17

Dear Complete and Total Loser,

I want to be a writer but I go to a public school where no one has time to read anything I've written and none of the classes I take offer any chances to write anyway. What can I do?

Jacob

Dear Jacob,

Raymond Carver, writing.

The Loser is a failed writer so he knows something about this but will try not to go on and on the way he does sometimes. 

The best art teacher the Loser ever had (he majored in art) was in high school. Mr. Finch said said simply this: "If you want to learn to draw, draw." Simple enough. The same applies to writing. The problem with both is, as you indicated in your question, feedback. If you're in study hall and you're  drawing something good in a sketchbook, someone will see it and say, "Wow, that's good!" Not so if you're writing something good. And publishing it somehow doesn't necessarily help because other things get in the way. Reading takes a greater commitment than viewing a picture so people are more judgmental and less likely to read something that doesn't grab them right away or is by a known author they like. 

So writing's an uphill battle even if you're good. But some do make a living at it, unlike the Loser, who is a middle aged cashier. Here are some words of advice:

• Read a lot and good things. If a really good sentence or passage strikes you, read it again. Maybe even copy it down someplace.
• Write. Keep a journal. Consider getting a cheap notebook and writing with a pen instead of using your computer. You'll write differently that way and pay more attention to what you're writing as you're writing it. There are good books on writing. Look into getting them.
• Learn basic rules of grammar and subtle things about punctuation for American English. Did you know that periods and commas always go inside quotation marks? That you don't capitalize the names of the seasons? That you don't say "twelve noon" or "twelve midnight" but just "noon" and "midnight"? That it's toward, not towards and backward not backwards? Many don't know these and dozens of other rules. Knowing them is the mark of a professional. 
• Work for your school newspaper if there is one. Writing is an art, journalism is a trade. But you will be able to write for publication, which will affect your nerves more than you can imagine. You'll make mistakes and hundreds of copies of them will make it into print. People will mock what you've written or find mistakes in it. This will thicken your skin but in a good way.
• Listen to people and talk to them. Interact with others. To make a solid building, you need sturdy materials. To write solid prose, you need to go outside your imagination. People are your quarry. 
• Learn about things and learn how to research. The Loser just finished reading Rabbit is Rich by John Updike. Updike showed great knowledge of contemporary Toyota dealerships and what it was like to invest in gold in 1980. Why would he know that? The Loser has no idea, but it gave the book a realism it wouldn't have had otherwise.
• Find someone who will read your work. Not a publisher; they're swamped. See if there's even one teacher at school who will read your work and offer criticism. If you live in a big enough area, there may be classes and workshops for young writers.
• Don't rely on the web. Yes, you can post something on facebook and tell your friends to read them and they'll tell you how good it is. This is worthless. So are blogs. On average, just two people a day look at the blog you are reading now and the Loser gets one comment a year. 
• Do this now. The Lose always had a career in writing in the back of his mind but didn't get the confidence to pursue it until it was too late. He ended up a cub reporter and was passed over for promotion by someone half his age.