I am dismayed to realize that much of the advice I used to parcel out to aspiring writers has passed its sell-by date. In the past, I had a fairly standard set of suggestions for anyone who wanted to write for a living. Move to a medium-sized city, I’d say. Get a job writing for the paper, any paper—don’t forget the alternative newsweeklies, the local rags, even the community newsletters. Don’t go to graduate school—it’s expensive, and no one cares about writing degrees. And, most important, don’t move back home! Your parents will make you go to law school!

So what happened? First of all, many of the medium-sized cities I used to recommend (say, Portland, Oregon) are now overrun with aspiring writers, and have gotten too expensive to qualify anymore as the place to go when you’re an aspiring writer with no hope for gainful employment. The newspapers—well, you don’t need me to tell you that the alternative newsweeklies have folded, the local rags have migrated online, and the community newsletters have been Craigslisted into oblivion. As for my admonition about graduate school, it turns out that if you get a teaching position as part of your deal, it probably pays better than many jobs you might get in that medium-sized city with the non-existent newspaper.

As for parents, that is the one thing that hasn’t changed. Parents, it seems, have an almost Olympian persistence when it comes to suggesting more secure and lucrative lines of work for their children who have the notion that writing is an actual profession. I say this from experience. Even after I’d published three books and had been writing full-time for twenty years, my father continued to urge me to go to law school. I think he deliberately misinterpreted my look of discomfort whenever we’d have this discussion. “Oh, there, there, don’t worry!” he’d say. “It’s not too late!”