Are there any stories of successful authors with STEM backgrounds?
I'm studying electrical engineering and everyone in my faculty seems pretty boring and baaic, and I imagine it'll get worse inside the industry.
I need some inspiration, I'm only 21. It's not to late for me, r-right bros?
Also if you think getting a Yea Forums gf is hard try doing it while studying in a STEM department, this shit's impossible.
Drop out of school and take a Greyhound bus to Detroit. Bare knuckle box or cage fight negroids.
Neal Stephenson is a successful author with a STEM background. He is a genre writer though and admits to being one as well. His stuff is fun and at least tries to be intelligent. Though I have no clue what his recent stuff is like. ReadMe was fucking awful.
I live in Chile what other option do I have
Obviously no, retard. You may find an example here and there but they will be second rate writers. All writers of worth commited themselves to literature 100%. If they couldn't, then they at least commited their free time to literature 100%. You already show you're not a writer by choosing the pathetic electrical engineering degree. Your job is to be a pawn, forgotten by history. Let us the real men, picked apart by the muses, to write literature (i am a neet and i dedicate 100% of my free time to literature like browsing Yea Forums and writing).
>this is the example of a STEM writer
Lmao. You can cite Yudkowski as well, another product of STEM education. Fantastic author who wrote masterpieces such as "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality".
Tom Pynchon. I believe he was studying engineering before he joined the navy, but when he went back he studied literature. He also worked as a technical writer for some big engineering firm or corporation like Boeing or something like that
Drop out and work at one of those copper mines in the desert?
How big of a fucking loser do you have to be to completely alter your life plans because you are worried there aren't enough authors in what you are studying?
Retard. Thomas Pynchon learned how to write with Nabokov. He retained nothing from his "engineering" education and it only served him a wikipedia tier knowledge about math and physics that he used to write GR.
Wrong. See Loren Eiseley.
It's a legitimate concern. You need to look at statistics. It's unlikely that a man who chooses STEM as his life path will ever make it in the literature scene. STEM demands too much time and attention.
Ok but what if I write as a hobby until I save up enough money to build a country house in Patagonia and go live there and write 100% of the time
>He retained nothing from his "engineering" education
How do you know though? Also Nabokov was a terrible professor and didn’t even remember Pynchon. Teaching at Cornell was merely a formality for him so that he could be paid to write his own works.
I was a STEM bro with a Yea Forums gf. I did a major in Computer Science but also had another major in the Humanities. I'm working right now in the industry, but I broke up with my qt Yea Forums gf.
Basically I found you can only have 2 of the 3. Either you have a qt Yea Forums gf and work in STEM or you work in STEM and can make art on the side. Your days do not allow enough for both. While I was with my qt Yea Forums gf, I didn't have time to write, but now that I'm alone, I can write a lot more.
>Loren Eiseley
>some nobody second rate writer
>i'm wrong somehow
Only proved my point. American literature is already trash. One can only imagine how unbelievably bad an STEM-American writer is.
But doesn't it suck that in the industry people only talk about football or cars or we and not literature?
How do you cope with that?
I’m a Chad
He admits it so in his introduction to his short story collection Slow Learner. He talks about how he doesn't really understand these math concepts and only uses them at face value to produce an aesthetic. Pynchon himself said that he learned how to plot with Nabokov, so he wasn't a bad professor at all.
pratchett
You're never gonna make it here, tienes que irte a México como Bolaño
>pynchon himself said that he learned how to plot with nabokov
as a writer, i'm skeptical of that claim. we often exaggerate our debts to the tutors and professors we admire, in order to appear good pupils
It’s definitely Thomas Pynchon you fucking pseuds. You’d know if you read his works.
In order to understand some of the finer terminology he uses you almost needed to have served in the aviation engineering corps of the military like he did.
That’s why we like him. He’s like the fucking insane engineering kid who is obsessed with philosophy. He’s talking about plane parts and Kant and Kafka and you’re just like nodding ‘ok...ok... I think this makes sense?
He has that logarithmic cabin equation I laugh my ass off at all the time
I’m Chad, you’re virgin
you sound like one of pynchon's characters. go back to the shadow
michael polanyi is based and redpilled
was a chemist, 2 of his students and his son won nobel prize in chem
wrote personal knowledge and the tacit dimension among other things
his brother was a pretty good historian if I remember correctly as well
Maybe Dosto, I belive he had some kind of technical STEM background.
Primo Levi
Ernesto Sábato had a PhD in physics
There are some smart people in the industry. They haven't read the classics, but they'll have something intelligent to say. There's always a few somewhat-lit people in the industry, so it's not too bad. In general, as long as you can talk with people and aren't so self-centered, a lot of people are really open about letting you show them literature you like. So I do get to talk about literature by showing them poems and quotes I like and basically going on about why its beautiful and stuff. I got one co-worker to read Faulkner for example.
The bad thing about the industry is that everyone is a capitalist really. Other than that, you get literary fulfillment with Yea Forums friends out of work.
Nice, first time hearing his name of Yea Forums. In fact I'm reading The Wrench rn. Have you read a lot of Levi? Any favorites?
If you want to try to be a successful author, go for it. Even if there is a lack of prior STEM authors, that doesn't necessitate that there will never be any future ones. I cannot speak for you, but asking us for inspiration isn't going to help. Either do it or don't, it's up to you.
Only If This is a Man. It was pretty good, not sentimental at all.
Is the Wrench good?
>do you literally have to be a humanities faggot to write well
GENE WOLFE
William Carlos Williams was a doctor
If this is a man is great. The Canto of Ulysses is one of the most impactful, emotionally resonant pieces I've ever experienced. Thinking about it gives my chills.
Check out The Truce and The Periodic Table, if you've taken well to Levi, his persona, and his writing style.
Gonna be honest about the Wrench, user. I'm really not feeling it, but I'll finish it since it's pretty short and a chill read at that.
>Pynchon himself said that he learned how to plot with Nabokov
not sure how
>so he wasn't a bad professor at all
follows
Thanks for the recommendations, gonna check them out
Do you think it is harder for a smart STEM person to be a successful authors or for an average intelligence humanities person?
as a matter of fact, in today's world... you do
depends how you define success. if your goal is to make money, any hack with an understanding of market forces can write a best-seller. as for good, literary writing, assiduous study is more important than intelligence. in that respect, humanities average-joes have the advantage, since STEMlords only study maths and read literature very superficially
Nope
si
It’s neither.
People are too obsessed with what degree you chose. Does not matter
No. As a matter of fact see this other post I just made
I major in microbiology and everyday I feel my brain gets heavier with useless info. I need money to live for the next 7 years and maybe I'll decide to off myself.
Not a single person in my prestigious MFA has a STEM degree. Perhaps you say degree does not matter because "anyone can write," as normals like to believe. In fact, possessing a STEM degree reflects a kind of intelligence-disposition that precludes or selects against the study of literature for its own sake. While I have no scientific papers backing my claim, I do have anecdotal evidence which could easily be seconded by nation-wide statistics
70% of each creative writing class i took at my holier-than-thou elite university was STEM majors, and the best writers were always the STEM kids. The English and, God save them, CREATIVE WRITING majors were horrendous in comparison.
i majored in CS/math and minored in english and creative writing, work in software, and am a pretty good writer. i had a professor in a workshop forward one of my short stories i shopped to the editor of tinhouse. there are plenty of people that can do both STEM and humanities
creative writing at the undergrad level is a joke, i hope you understand that. everyone in your class, including you, was a hopeless amateur
>tin house
accepted or not?
Bolaño didn't even had a degree????
He doesn’t want to hear that. He wants to hear that the vast amount of money his parents paid to send him to school enable him to resurrect the dead memories of aristocracy so he can rise above the unwashed masses and become something inhuman
i get that its a joke and not like an MFA. my point was, at least part of the pool of people that do an MFA start off like the kids that would do creative writing classes. (Everyone I know that did an MFA majored in English or something similar.) among those, the STEM kids are bringing much more interesting work to the table at that stage of their writing career than the traditionals.
and not accepted, style wasn’t in line with the journal
Me desu, also William Carlos Williams and Samuel Shem
>Are there any stories of successful authors with STEM backgrounds
Would be a waste
With that fag attitude you won't make it like a writer, user. Start watching sports.
Is tennis the most Yea Forums sport or what
>I live in Chile
Let's be Yea Forums friends.
>not watching test cricket
once you understand the nuances and culture of test cricket, you're iq increases by 50 points
>inb4 POO
fuck off
Santiago?
All sports are Yea Forums. But I'd say boxing.
Yeah.
so true
Alright. Me too frend
Tell me about you. Are you studying?
I'll start going to film school in a couple of weeks. I don't know if I'll finish it. I haven't planned so far yet.
What writers you like?
Bolaño, Pynchon, Cortázar, Faulkner, Borges
You?
Cómo no has escuchado de Sabato pendejo
Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Pynchon, McCarthy. From yours I like Pynchon and Faulkner. Haven't read Bolaño nor Cortazar. I dislike Borges.
What are you reading right now? I'm halfway trough Moby Dick.
Just got to the fourth part of The Sound and the Fury. It's been quite a ride.
Sí leí El túnel
You're OP, right? What kind of thing you want to write? You have anything planned?
I agree and share similar experiences with about everything you said, but I think you'd find the industry in the centers of culture (west coast chain LA, SF, Seattle or NY and NY influenced acaddmic east coast cities you'd find less homogeneously capitalist peers. Most are still boring but theres a substantial amount of social policy obsessed progs and legit economic lefties mixed in
Yes I don't have anything planned yet, the idea just struck me a couple of weeks ago, in a combination of post-breakup loneliness and reading TSATF. I'll start writing a journal probably, but ultimately I'd like to write prose.
What about you? You want to write?
>Sí leí El túnel
Ah pues bueno, él era matemático y físico si no mal recuerdo, entonces cae just dentro de lo que estabas preguntando.
Y siéndote sincero ser escritor no es algo que puedas planear, creo que realmente es algo que tienes o no. Tú sólo sigue escribiendo por escribir y no por alguna ilusión de ser reconocido por eso en algún momento y trata de no forzarte a escribir, que venga de algún lugar genuino, si no es así no podrás ser un escritor en el primer lugar.
Ideally I want to make films but writing is not off the table. I think literature has reached its end point though.
Idk if you heard of him, but iirc Enrique Verastegui studied Economics and accounting. He is a peruvian poet. He founded the Hora Zero movement if I'm not mistaken.
you can always just be a STEM guy with an appreciation for literature, like that Oppenheimer faggot who kept quoting the Bhagavad Gita
I got a PhD in physics and I don't quite think it's possible. You'll not be a good STEM guy if you don't do it in your free time as well, I'd argue. Same for your writing.
But for the sake of it, let me browse my mind.
- Newton wrote more text Christianity that he did about math or physics.
- Maxwell wrote poems
- Hofstadter wrote books
- For better or worse that Black Swan guy has serious academic papers too
But okay all of the above didn't write novels. Not sure what "successful author" means to you.
If you count technical books, than Sagan and Hawking or Darwin would also be successful authors.
Yudkovsky is a bad example since he's not formally educated and is a victim of his autism and exposure to sci-fi at the impressionable age.
I am become retard, destroyer of logic.
90 posts in, no mention of Asimov, wow.
Coetze, Sabato.
Asimov is childish tho.
Celine was a doctor, Thomas Browne was as well. Thats’s medicine though. Hard sciences seem a but removed from the liberal arts.
Bumping for interest btw
Kurt Vonnegut did Engineering
Yevgeny Zamyatin was originally a naval engineer that began writing as a hobby
Anton Chekov, Ludwig Wittgenstein OP
There has literally been NO elite philosopher who studied/majored philosophy in their upper education
Go to Argentina instead of Detroit
brainlet post
Came here to post this
This beautiful man in pic related was an engineer and wrote the best novel of the XXth century
>americanized mapuche zoomer hasn't even read Cortázar
shame
Should I learn German to read him or is the English translation ok?
Unless you literally become something like the guy that split the atom, no one will care when you quote your favorite scripture. It misses the point of OP’s concern then.
I read it in spanish and the translation was fairly good, it's obvious some things are either lost or gained in translation but you get what you get
OP just asked about successful authors with a STEM background, and I'd say Asimov counts. Dude had a doctoral degree, was an insanely prolific writer, and a ton of his work is still in print.
Baseball, of course.
Why do you need to be writer when you can make fucking SNES using FPGA? Electrical Engineer is superior degree.
Houellebecq is the only 21st century writer who really interests me. He studied agricultural engineering (agronomy) more or less on a whim, because he heard in secondary school it would lead to different kinds of careers. Prior to success he floated in and out of mental hospitals, unemployment, and programming jobs.
I don't think many good writers actually come out of MFA programs. Successful ones, sure. Prestigious MFAs are basically a pipeline to the publishing world. But good?
A tertiary-level arts degree today is basically a warehousing program for students who don't know they're getting scammed. If you have the luck to attend an elite university then sure, take the risk, but for 95% of people it's not just a waste of time, it's actually a detriment to your ability to produce art. You'll find out very quickly that it's not easy to find the time and energy to write when you're working in retail or manual labor and worrying about the rent.
Irte de este país, como cualquier persona con un CI de tres cifras sabe.
Where tho
Chile's future seems comfy in comparison to what'll happen in Europe and America in the next 10-20 years
Tennis is pretty Yea Forums. However, the most Yea Forums games for sure are polo and croquet. Polo because it's the sport of kings. Croquet because it's incredibly leisurely and probably can compose lines while playing it. Not even british, i just 'mire the greats.
hey I was just doing that
Dr. William Luther Pierce
Ted Chiang. He wrote the short story that Arrival was based on.
>Physicist
>Mathematician
>Poet
His books are hot garbage and he never accomplished anything in his life.
He said successful, tranny
Ok this man is my main inspiration
Decent amount of doctors became good writers. George Saunders was an engineer in mining before he went into writing.
Rabelais was a physician.
Also Poincaré, Hadamard, Grothendieck and Laurent Schwartz were world-class mathematicians but also good writers with philosophical insight.
Look, user. I'm going to pull this band-aid off now. I say this as a friend, not an enemy. The likelihood that you are going to be a monumental author or a monumental scientist is slim to none. You should spend some time trying to alter your mindset and seek to find something meaningful, rather than fame-seeking. Write, read, learn more about STEM, do things that you find meaning in. Success is not a guaranteed road to happiness. The sooner you discover this, the better. I love you, fren!
Stanislav Lem
Asimov was a chemist
Clarke was a mathematician
Heinlein was an aeronautic engineer
I think godel escher bach was written by a mathematician, feynman books will always be better than 2deep4u bullshit literature , so you could say that stem has great authors , they just dont pat themselves on the back about it.
Why are you idiots always arguing about undergrad degrees?
Thomas Pynchon had a degree in engineering and worked as an engineer for a while. He's widely considered one of the best novelists of his generation, even by Big Boy Bloom posters.
Prior to about the 60-70s there was no distinction to say yay or nay. In some countries there still isn't. I would say, career-wise, you can't get anywhere without going through the proper channels so very few STEMfags will be able to no matter how good they are at writing. But in terms of skill and originality, it's just up to the individual and their interests.
Oh, nothing really major, just Isaac Asimov, one of the fathers of science fiction, who was a professor for a big chunk of his life. A lot of sci fi authors are naturally drawn to science.
Go to Guatemala. Run around the remote villages and claim your Jesus and has returned. You'll either get killed or come away with a good story. Either way, success!
Un país rico no equivale a un país culto
He didn't get an engineering degree nor worked as an engineer. He dropped out of engineering for English and was a technical writer.