Is there a non-academic route to being a high quality, well-respected

yeah

write good shit

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>>9595953
>assuming even quality writers are relatively respected in 2017
Pic related. Even if you achieved moderate success and acclaim like Franzen, you'd be pigeonholed as muh white male dudebro author at best.
Literary giants no longer exist, regardless of the path you take.

>>9595953
You could try being a 70-year-old Hungarian

>>9595953
Any serious writer today either has to bite the industry bullet and do some gymnastics or be perfectly comfortable writing in obscurity.

>>9595953
My guess is to work obsessively on craft and prose, then have a career or lifestyle that offers the ability to travel or develop a skill beyond sitting at a desk, or spend time on the fringes of society/civilization, where there is real risk/danger, and then write a quality memoir/biographical novel.

>>9595953
Writing your diary desu and then killing yourself like DFW

>>9596012
Post feet bitch

>>9595982
Franzen is garbage, and if people "muh white male" him, it's not purely because he's a white male, but because his books are about being a painfully upper-middle class, small liberal arts college creative writing major.

>>9595953
The majority of what's published never stands the test of time, and this has nothing to do with any NEW "ambiguous standards of quality in post-modern literature"-- look at Vargas Llosa or Krasznahorkai. Maybe the issue is with what you read, and not the general popular consensus.

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>>9596119
The only reason anybody dislikes Franzen is because they're jealous and don't like what he represents politically

He's the single most important American writer still active (yes, better than DeLillo and Pynchon) and will be remembered in a century as a defining figure of our time.

He's the go-to whipping boy for jaded teens and pseuds because white-bread dads aren't considered cool or edgy. The pseuds like to read somebody who they can hang a poster of on their dorm wall and sneer when they hear somebody mispronounce his name.

But in reality, the fiction Franzen's pushing is technically superior and more emotionally relevant than anything the pomo crowd has done since JR. He's warping the limits of American culture and finding kernels of insight deep within topics that are hated by wannabe-revolutionaries, topics like familial relationships, upper middle class milieu, and higher education. Topics that are more urgent and important to the average person than trash like meta-fiction, media, and identity politics, and yet ignored by the pseuds because they offer no image of contrarianism or mindless individualism.

I wouldn't be surprised if he earns the Nobel before his death. I'm looking forward to what will be I'm sure a long and fruitful literary career

>>9595953
As for everything today, becoming a well known personality in no matter which way offers you the possibility to give it a shot. Someone will sell your book just because it's written by you, and someone will buy it for the same reason. Then of course it's up to you and to your writing

>>9596153
That's bullshit and you know it, people don't like Franzen because he spouts the exact same college liberal shit at them but tries to make it like he's discovered some profound wisdom.

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You should research how little "high quality, well-respected writers" sell, it isn't about academia, It's about selling 200 copies out of the 3000 printed (this happens literally all the time).