A helpful local billboard has informed me that Les Miserables, the touring stage production, will be in town soon (or has already been in town – I forget).
My first thought: “Ugh, didn’t I just see that?”
I did. And whatever hopes I had that the new movie version would salvage the stage production for me were curiously moot, because the things I hate most about Boublil and Natel’s adaptation of Les Miserables are endemic to their adaptation. (Some, but not all, are mitigated in the novel, or at least in its English translation.)
The Top Five Things I Hate About the “Musical Phenomenon” Les Miserables:
As I probably mention every time I forget I’ve already mentioned it before, I write for a living. I write book reviews. I ghostwrite blogs. My web page content brings all the personal injury clients to the firm (and they’re like, “your firm’s better than theirs.” Damn right, it’s better than theirs). Etc.
I didn’t start out as a writer, per se. I did get an undergraduate degree in English, but then I went to law school. I got a J.D., and then I practiced law for a while. And then I said “screw this, I want to be a writer,” and started my own freelance writing business. And, in doing so, I learned that a lot of the things I was told as a kid about being a professional writer are total crap – and some of them are actually true.
So: here are Six Things That Are False About Writing for a Living (and Six Things That Are True).
1. You can’t make a living as a writer.
False, but with a catch, which is this: you probably can’t make a living writing nothing but novels, unless you are lucky enough to be Stephen King – and even Stephen King was not lucky enough to be Stephen King at first. Same with J.K. Rowling – she was living in a garret with no heat and an infant when she wrote the first Harry Potter novel. It’s not impossible to make novel-writing a significant part of your life, if that’s what you want; just don’t expect it to be your only day job.
Dani Alexis 