As a kid I read my fair share of Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys. There was a calming quality to them because of how predictably the stories would always unfold - the winners and losers pre-ordained as if by divine will. You just had to enjoy the ride that came with the requisite number of twists and turns to get to that satisfying end when the world would be as it was meant to be. I liked the certainty that these books brought to my life. It was bit sad to read that the author of Hardy Boys really hated writing those books because they had no redeeming literary value. He aspired to be a good writer.
While that may be true, those books did bring other value to the lives of many generations of kids around the world. When I was reading them in India it was already literature from ancient times in North America, where they were written and the action took place. Nothing about my life and times in small-town India mirrored that of the Hardy Boys but it did not diminish the joy of devouring the books in one sitting until reaching the predictably satisfying last page. It was the same feeling of unwrapping a Cadbury's chocolate bar and knowing for sure how it would end. There was no room or scope for disappointment in either experience for a kid my age in India back in the day.
Writing, particularly fiction writing, is an act of quiet terror. You are alone all at once with your genius and your ineptitude, and your errors are as public as possible. To be a writer of fiction requires extreme self-discipline and extreme self-confidence, and many of the people drawn to writing have neither. It can be a recipe for dismal failure.
Writing is also, financially, a crap-shoot. Always has been. Sometimes, good writers starve. Sometimes, dreadful writers succeed. John Grisham's sentences thud and crepitate all over the page, and he has become a literary tycoon. Edgar Allan Poe nearly starved.
Mostly, you become a writer not because you want to get rich or famous, but because you have to write; because there is something inside that must come out. When a baby is to be born, she is born.
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