A Writer’s Contrarian Response to Great Startup Advice
I am going to suggest that a writer avoid some of the advice above. Here are thirteen notions of why.
You do not need a cofounder. Fly by the seat you know the rest.
Location is unnecessary if you have a chair and a means of getting thoughts out.
Understanding who I am aiming at is not essential. If I understood them, I would not be a writer. I am of course aiming at everyone. Whether they read or not.
Practice and encourage mass ambivalence. It makes you feel good. And it’s a hedge against both failure and success.
Though Mark Zuckerberg and I shared a common secondary education, I eschew emulating him or anyone else. Mark may be a role model but until he builds #cybercommunities he will be an also-ran in my book. Along with other usual suspects.
Offer no customer service. Should you be aware that a person has bought your book or written a review or something like that, get down on your knees and say Hosanna and then back on your chair.
Take Saroyan for a role model, minus the skeevy stuff and with a little more energy for later years.
Make readers unhappy. This is an acquired ability requiring years of practice, unless you lack a pleasant nature to begin with. A writer should be concerned with truth, beauty and justice. These things taken together do not appear to be high on start-up dance cards.
Explain what you are doing. Yes. I agree. If you are seeking to overcome a herd mentality, defeat celebritization and achieve justice at the expense of pet notions on all sides.
As to talking and driving, I deplore both. Even if one is heroic enough to risk going a mile at the wheel of a car that can be hacked, the mere willingness to own a vehicle is almost as bad as caving in and buying a home. Stand-alone dwellings remain sadly omnipresent in our sprawl world. This is a sign of serious atrophy requiring the attention of healers as yet unborn.
Do not seek investment capital or anything else that involves you with people on a business basis. If you are me, you do everything yourself and publish on Kindle. It is not heaven but it beats mucking around with publishers and agreeing to die in a room full of people you do not know who are hoping you are not who you really are.
Keep your hopes up all the time. You never know when lightning will strike, a tipping point reached or you will be inundated with all of the recognitions you have said you despise. When that time comes, marry someone who is a PR pro and shunt the work off on her.
If you have to start, you are lost already. This is for people who started before they were born and whose universal consciousness is not blandished by dreams of camaraderie in hot rooms and meetings with people you neither know nor care about. If you do not care about everyone, you should never be a writer. But you might consider a start-up.
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Stephen C. Rose writes daily. Medium is his drafting board. Kindle his marketplace. You the reader his hopeful supporter. He promotes his thought and art on Twitter and has his own publication on Medium called Everything Comes which any new writer can join on the way to finding his or her way.
