What Do You Want from Your Writing?
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I’ve been thinking about the Authors Guild survey on writers’ incomes since it came out a few weeks ago, and its blunt warning that “the career of full-time professional author has become endangered.” The economic reality is staggering: The median book-related income for a full-time writer in 2017 was just $20,300, and most writers aren’t even doing that well—in fact, 54 percent of those surveyed reported the income their books generated that year was less than the federal poverty benchmark of $12,488.
Some writers fared better, of course. The top 10 percent of the survey respondents reported a median book-related income of $167,000. (Remember, a median isn’t an average, it’s a midpoint—so the actual incomes ranged from $84,200 all the way to $9,300,000.) At the opposite end of the spectrum, though, 20 percent of the writers polled said they hadn’t made any income at all from their books that year.
The Authors Guild places great priority on the economic viability of the writing profession, and the report does an excellent job of reviewing the trends in the publishing and bookselling industries that have created this situation. Cultural trends, too: It’s duly noted that people are reading (and, more to the point, buying) fewer books than they used to, and expecting the (e-)books they do buy to be cheaper than ever, and that means less money making its way to every writer’s bank account, too.
There’s a real concern, expressed by several writers interviewed for the report, that these brutal circumstances are going to keep a lot of people from even trying to make it as a writer, because they simply can’t afford to do it full-time, and there’s barely any incentive to pursue a side hustle writing around your job and your other responsibilities and obligations when there are so many other relaxing ways to spend those few spare moments.
At one point, Douglas Preston expresses his concern that many aspiring writers will fall prey to what he calls “censorship of the marketplace,” abandoning their potential writing careers before they’ve even really begun. And, though the survey’s data set could certainly benefit by being larger, what information it did gather shows that such impact is likely to be felt first—and more frequently—by writers of color. This means that, if the publishing industry were left to its own devices, our literary culture’s diversity problem might get even worse before it gets better. (Fortunately, some publishers appear to be taking proactive steps in that regard.)
Long story short, though, if, as Samuel Johnson said, no man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money, well, just about nobody but a blockhead would go into writing thinking they were going to be the one to make a living wage from it.
And you know what? That’s fine.
If you want to be a writer because you want to make a lot of money, let me give you some advice: Don’t. Go to business school, go to medical school, heck, go to law school. Learn a trade. You’ll probably do a lot better for yourself than you would as a full-time writer. You might even make enough money that you could dedicate some spare time to writing without getting anxious about whether it was cutting into your earning power.
What if we didn’t look at writing as a career, though?
Obviously, everybody likes to be compensated for their efforts. But I believe we write, first and foremost, because we have something we want to share with the world.
We write to inform—to share the knowledge we’ve acquired through research or experience, to express our opinions, to call attention to something we think more people ought to be noticing.
We also write to entertain—to give people a cathartic emotional experience (usually, but not always, a happy one), or to get them excited about something that excites us, to feel passion for something we feel passionate about.
Many times, you’ll want to inform and entertain—to inspire people to take action, for example, or encourage them to feel empathy for real or fictional people. (Or other living creatures!)
We write because we feel compelled to share these things with others. People talk about writing as a cathartic, almost therapeutic experience for the writer, and sometimes there’s an element of truth to that, in the sense that we may be writing to process or make sense of something we’ve experienced, or something we’ve learned.
That’s not all there is to it, though. We’re almost never just writing for ourselves. If we were just going through all that process for ourselves, why would we be putting everything down on paper (or on a hard drive) instead of just thinking our way through it? Well, okay, sometimes it’s useful to have a written record so you can better organize your thoughts and refresh your memory. That’s true. Even then, though, I’d argue that there’s an implicit audience, that—consciously or unconsciously—we want to share what we’ve written with somebody, even if we don’t know who it is as we’re writing.
And when you feel that desire to share the things you’re most passionate about strongly enough, the economic hurdles won’t hold you back. You might not know how you’ll ever be able to make money from it, let alone enough money to be able to dedicate yourself to doing nothing else. But that’s not going to stop you from pouring your heart out on the page (or the keyboard) and then fine-tuning the results over and over until you don’t think you could possibly express yourself any better—and then launching into one more draft, just in case.
And then, as Emm Roy suggests, there will be one more amazing thing in the world.