Does anyone else have literary ambitions?
Title says it all. Does anyone else dream of being the next David Foster Wallace or Philip Roth whenever they read novels? I was reading some Jonathan Franzen the other day and thought, I could probably write something on par with this. Like Nick Carraway of The Great Gatsby, I went to a top Ivy with dreams of literature, only to shelve that passion for, instead of the bond business, investment banking. Should I just forget these naive dreams and focus on living the life I have? Any advice is appreciated. Thank you.
Money is in screenplays these days unless you get really lucky.
Thanks, and I suppose you're right, but my ambition isn't necessarily to make money or become best-selling, but rather to win literary awards and become respected in highbrow intellectual/literary circles; the money comes in after.
I don’t dream of being the next William Faulkner, but I do have I intentions of writing a book when I’m a bit older. Maybe when I have a beach house or lake house and can look out into the water and think and write.
If a house on a medium pond came your way, would you settle?
I see Goldie's always closing
Sure but not in Chicago lol
I dont know, DFW killed himself. the other guy ived never heard of.
I think it'd be cool to write a book some day. Big fan of Michael Malice and I know he used to work at Goldman. No idea if he was front office but he's undoubtedly a smart guy who writes some great nonfiction.
This is perfectly natural and really a good goal to have. I'm in banking not to have money, but to have the capital necessary to support a later life of writing/film-making/insert-artistic-pursuit.
That said, reading a top author like Franzen and thinking you could write something like that is hopelessly naive lmao. Many many people try their hand at writing, and 99.9% are absolutely terrible. Having a good literary voice, solid drive to consistently write, being well-read enough to build upon past literary works, having something worth saying, and overarching literary talent are each pretty fucking rare, and it's exceedingly rare to find them all in one person. Hence the lack of many good authors. If you're straight and white that makes it 10x harder as well, because publishing is utterly dominated by liberal women.
Recently went through the literary agent process for my book....probably 80% of the agents are women. Got 4 full manuscript reads for my fairly male-driven investment banking novel....all those agents were male and not obviously liberal in their bios. Coincidence?
Yeah sort of I wrote a novella a couple months ago I'll send it to you if you want.
Creative writing is going to be taken over by language model AI software in the next few years. Read some of the stuff that GPT-3 has come up with. At its best, it's jaw-dropping. At the very least, the entire activity of writing will be dramatically altered.
I know this might sound weird if you're not up on what's been happening in this area recently, but I'm serious.
Ridiculously stupid take, both practically and philosophically.
How much time have you spent learning about this technology? If I knew nothing about it, my initial reaction would be dismissal too.
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-computers-are-ge…
As an english major working in IB, I have goals to work enough early on that I can retire and work on poetry in seclusion. Would love to write a novel as well.
Yes I want to become the next Erika Mitchell
Would you consider combining your interests? Using your knowledge of finance to write compelling analyses or content for an investment start-up?
Absolutely, though not on fiction. That is brutally hard unless you've trained for it for many, many years and given extremely high volume of content released these days (vs. back in the day of Shakepsear where there just wasn't that much being published) it's harder than ever to break out
My ambitions are in writing non-fiction pieces, ideally related to investing as I gain mastery over the craft (which I am a very long way away from) - might be investing process, end-to-end research process, factors to look for in various types of businesses, psychological hacks, etc. Otherwise, would love to do dedicated research on certain industries / spaces that appeal & maybe write something there. Would be nice to write something timeless like Common Stocks & Uncommon Profits or some of the stuff Nassim Taleb has put out
The Great Gatsby is my favorite book. Does that make me basic?
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