Why Writers Write
The world is lousy with aspiring novelists who will probably never be published. Intelligent Life Magazine offers insight into what keeps them writing.
Somewhere in the world right now, ten million souls are hunched over their keyboards writing novels. Ten million hopeful scribblers in their holes. … The figure is a speculation, but backed up by statistics. A quarter of a million new novels are published annually across the globe, 100,000 of them in English. This represents, in turn, a quarter, maybe, of the manuscripts that agents try to hawk. Agents, as all writers know, take only a small proportion of the work they’re sent, perhaps a tenth. Ten million scribes in search of a reader may not be so tall a tale.
