Becoming A Writer/Breaking Into The Business

I'm going to assume for some reason that at least a few of the posters here either have experience in the field, or have researched it.

How did you get into it? How did you manage to get published? How does someone with no experience get jobs as a freelancer?

I know, it's kind of a stupid thing to ask here, but I've felt kind of overwhelmed in trying to get into it myself. I'm often told I'm a good storyteller, and I describe and explain things well, and I do enjoy writing. How am I supposed to compete with people with teams of writers who each went to college specifically for the writing field though?

Best advice I could give is: don't bother unless you have a complete piece written and done to your taste.

Seriously. It's just fair. Do you think your father should risk his job for some random faggot who thinks he's the new Shakespeare? Or course not. Wanna get published? Bring out them finished works.

Now, if you have a piece done, then you WILL get published. Much worse writers get published constantly. Just like I wasn't pessimistic last paragraph, I'm not optimistic in this one. Publishers and readers are people. They're used to sub-par stuff. And most of the time they can't tell shit from gold at first, anyway.

Now then.
You've got a piece complete. Fine! You get a list of publishers near you and come visit them personally. "I'm a writer", you say, "and I want to publish this work of mine. I like your style, so I want you to do the job. Here's the CD with the complete, final version of the work."

Now, get ready: out of ten publishers, seven are going to tell you that you suck (after taking a months time reading your work) even if you're the king of prose. They're dull bitter assclowns, those editors. Don't talk back. Just blacklist them so that you won't spend any more time on them. "Goodbye," and off you go to another one.
#7 and #8 are gona propose to purchase all rights for your story and characters forever for a price of one dollar. Tell them you'll think on that when you're done considering all other proposals.

The last one is going to propose purchasing exclusive rights for your work for a year. Maximum three years. That's the one you need. Got several ones like that? Fine, pick the most luxurous one. Pick the one that published all those books you purchased in your bookstore, because your main gain here is audience and experience, not money: you can't get rich with your first work, anyway.

And there you go: you just got published. Earned laughable money. And a chance to become a renowned author, if you're good enough. Now, writing good stuff is up to you. You might want to listen to your readers. Just don't listen to your editors, most of whom don't know what they're talking about. Their job is selling crap as mediocrity, so they deal with everything as if it was crap that needs to get dressed up. They're going to change the title of your story from, I dunno, "Homini Dei, Gloria Hominus" to "Exciting Adventures". Fine, who cares. If this easily obscures best qualities of your writing, than your shit was too fragile for the generic reader to comprehend anyway.

So, there we go.