Being a writer is great, if you can afford it

It's a truism that all the fun and meaningful careers tend to be competitive and poorly compensated. I've been seeing a therapist lately, and when my insurance sends me the amounts they pay him, I'm consistently shocked: it's less than I bill as a freelance writer.

But writing corporate blog posts is not at all fun or satisfying, while presumably therapy is, so the latter, despite its extensive training requirements, gets paid much less.

Of course, the inverse isn’t true: unpleasant labor isn't necessarily well-compensated. Working retail seems pretty unpleasant; it's also not very well-paid.

They say that wages are set by supply and demand, but I wonder about this. All my life I've been paid well for things that I'm fairly certain most college-educated people could do. For much of that time, unemployment has been very high, with lots of people looking for and unable to find the work that I've been doing.

So I have given up on understanding the economy, except for this one point: anything at all fun or satisfying tends to be very poorly-renumerated.

Perhaps doctoring and software development are the exceptions. Doctors are well-paid (although most doctors I know would disagree with that) and many doctors find their work satisfying, but the supply of doctors is also artificially constrained by the extremely low number of medical school spots.

I'm at a loss to understand why software development is such a well-paid profession, since it seems fun and simple-to-learn. I've at least a dozen friends who've landed six figure jobs after taking just a twelve-week courses in how to code.

I guess the moral of the story is that you should learn to program computers. Not everybody has the mind for it, but I've been surprised at the people who can pick it up. Even some friends of mine who seem very left-brained (including one who majored in cultural anthropology in college) have successfully learned how to code.

 

Writing fiction is incredible. It's everything people say it is. Well I mean it's agony, of course, since most of the time I have no idea what to write, and even when I do write something, it usually doesn't sell, and even when it does sell, very few people read it. But it's still a meaningful occupation. And high-status too! People are quite impressed if you've published a book. They don't necessarily read the book (and I don't expect them too), but you still have status in their eyes, just the same as if you were a professional chess-player or a professional ballerina. People know it's not easy to get a book published.

I've been thinking a lot lately about the relationship between money and writing. The truth is that over the last four years, I've done okay, but that's mostly because of the large advance I received for Enter Title Here.

It's hard to believe I'll ever get one of that size again. There's very little security in this field. Even the concept of being a 'working writer' seems a bit meaningless. All you have is your last advance. There's no guarantee there will ever be another one. I’ve heard of NYT best-sellers who've had trouble selling another book. You're constantly in danger of losing your financial footing.

Not me, I'm fine. I have other income streams. And some savings. And I'm married to a doctor.

I suppose these are reflections prompted by my revisions on my second book. It's coming close to the time when the text will be put into production. At that point, this poor book will have to fend for itself.

With every book, you hope it'll catch fire and turn into something. I have those hopes for this one too. I think it can hold its own with the best YA novels that're out there. But you also realize that your opinion isn't necessarily shared by other people. Success is not guaranteed.

And with writing, it sometimes feels like there’s no middle-ground: if you’re not a best-seller, then the industry boots you out.

That's not entirely true. I have other tricks up my sleeve. I can change genres. That's it, actually, that's my only trick. I can change genres. Each time you write in a new genre, you start with a blank slate, and so far as I can tell, a writer can do this as many times as they want.

It's so different from other careers. My other friends have mostly achieved some stability by now. They have skills. They've gone to grad school. They get head-hunted on LinkedIn. Writing isn't like that. Even success doesn't last. The person winning awards one year doesn't even make the ballot in the next. The big book of the summer goes out of print within five years. I was thinking recently of a famous author from the early aughts and wondering why we don't notice anymore when he publishes a book. He’s just irrelevant: the culture is done with him, at least for now.

For me, writing is something between a hobby and a career. In many ways, I don't feel like my relation to it is very different from back in 2012, when I hadn't yet sold a book. I still mostly spend my time playing around. In fact, the best thing about this last year is that I finally got rid of the mouse (ahem ahem) that was hanging onto my back and turning the writing game into such a stressful experience. It's been a relief to recover my sense of exploration.

I spent two years writing sub-par books. After that experience, you can never again regard your creativity as something that's under your control. It comes, and it goes. Which means writing can never be a career in the way that other things are.

The writing world never interested me much, and now it interests me less. Writers aren't uninteresting people, but the element of careerism that runs through writing circles is extremely dull to me.

(Once someone objected to that opinion of mine, saying, "Why shouldn't people of the same profession spend their time talking about that profession?" and I didn't have an answer. Of course people should talk about whatever they want. But I find it so unhelpful to talk about career issues in the writing field. None of it can be planned. None of it can be managed. You cannot set goals and achieve them, because you cannot control, on the most basic level, whether anything happens when you sit down to write.)

I can't pretend that the time I spend alone with the written word is particularly satisfying. At times it is, but mostly it's a dull, intractable struggle. I try out idea after idea, approach after approach, and ninety-nine percent of them fail. My wife assures me that scientific research operates the same way.

On Wednesday I saw the latest remake of A Star Is Born, and in the movie Bradley Cooper is always telling Lady Gaga, in his raspy Johnny Cash imitation of a voice, that a singer "has got to have something to say."

I think that I have many things to say, but I wonder what my big ideas and my big themes are. I feel like my real work hasn't yet begun, and lately I've been thinking, "Oh wow, I need to watch my health, because there's a good chance it'll be another twenty or thirty more years before I'm able to write the novel I'm meant to write."

That expectancy sits like a stone in my stomach, and yet I know that looking back on this period, twenty or thirty years from now, the thing I'll envy the most will be that same sense of hope.