I wish you would have posted this about a year ago before I purchased my house . <| sep |> She isn ' t even top 20 for largest margins . <| sep |> You discuss two very interesting , but separate things here . One is making a living , and the other is learningpracticing an art form . Sometimes they overlap and sometimes they don ' t . In the case of fiction writing they rarely do . I can ' t speak for every last person here , but I ' d guess that almost all of the people in this sub will never make a living solely from writing scifi and we know that and are okay with it . Personally , my most ambitious expectation is if I were to get my work published and have it read by a decent number of people , and that those readers enjoy the experience and tell me about it . That ' s pretty much it . So if your goal is a paying career as a genre writer , then your prospects are grim as are anyone ' s . But if you just want to pick up a new craft for your own pleasure , then the only obstacle to writing is a little bit of effort . Personally , I have gone through many different creative avocations in my life , achievedreceived some extremely modest positive recognition in each of them , and then moved on to new things . Eratosthenes is my guide . He was lampooned with the nickname ' Beta ' by his critics for being second best at everything , but his fans nicknamed him Pentathlos after the wellrounded Olympic athletes .