The Fifty-Year Apprenticeship: A Writer’s Guide to Nothing

A young college student takes a few writing courses and discovers he has a great talent for it. He had majored in something more sensible, but decides he has to be a writer. The only problem is he has no idea how to make a living at it...

...so he asks his professor and he’s told there’s only one man in town who has actually made his living as a writer. A meeting is arranged for the two, and the student sits down with old writer, who looks to be in his 90s, but has had many books and essays published.

The student asks, “I’m not foolish enough to think I can get rich, but how can I be a working writer like you?”

“My boy,” the old writer says, “your youth is a time for ideals, passions, dreams and hopes. To be a writer, however, is to forsake all of these things. Your reality will be one of deprivation and hunger. There will be loneliness - endless loneliness - for writing is perhaps the loneliest profession of all. You will never be sure if you are a great thinker or merely caught in the grip of madness. But if you must write, and you never give up, and you continue to perfect your craft despite resigning yourself to a life of hunger, loneliness, and poverty, by the time you’re fifty, something wonderful happens.”

“Really? What happens when I turn fifty?”

“You get used to it!”