/lit/ - Literature

>be me
>25 years old
>suddenly care much less about writing
>suddenly feel an INTENSE desire to marry and have kids

What the fuck is happening /lit/? Am I being spooked? How do I cleanse myself of these ideological impurities?

The fact is many more people want to write than ever before. Just look at twitter at any point of the day and you'll see the #WhyIWrite or '#AmWriting hashtags being used frequently. So the novellas that big-name authors once published in their youth (early 20s) aren't worth of publication any longer. Tied to the fact that fame (regardless of merit) is desired - even expected - by more and more people, that writing requires no formal training or qualification, and that a culture of promoting self-worth to the point of delusion has made everyone think of themselves as potential stars, the pool of writers from which publishers are able to pick is now larger than ever. Would Thomas Mann's "Tonio Kröger" be published today, would John Edward Williams's "Nothing But The Night" be published today? There are so many novels, novellas and short story collections that writers who went on to develop their talents that would not be deemed as "marketable" in the contemporary publishing climate, and this perhaps suggests that potentially great authors are being overlooked (inb4 projecting) because their first novels aren't received well, and they are then trapped by a life of full-time employment and the attendant worries about living costs, house prices and so on. What the unsurprising consequence of this new culture of everybody wanting to be a writer and everybody being encouraged to think they have the talent to be one, is the elitism we see in the current publishing world, where the rabble are largely kept to self-publishing or vanity publishing while agents and publishing houses instead rely on a consistent supply of MFA Creative Writing grads to provide them with decent, marketable novels. They then desperately try and get a population of people who write (or at least think of writing) more than they read to buy these books, making on the most part very little profit.