More writing about writing

[ksmith]

Much blogging going on about the life of a working writer, mostly here, here, here, and over here. And here. There are likely some I missed, but they all seem to link together in one long blog necklace eventually, so give it time. If you want to read it, it will come.

I am not a working writer, in that I do not derive the majority of my income from writing. When I first started, I thought for sure that I would be able to quit the day job within a couple of years, but reality soon applied a blackjack upside my head. I'm not a fast writer. Too much worry about finances freezes me. When things get rough emotionally, I can barely manage sentences, much less entire books and stories. Add in the inconsistencies of the publishing world, and no, thanks. I'll do the best I can until I retire from the day job.

Maybe it's because I started so late. I didn't sell my first books until I was thisclose to 40, and I already had the mortgage and other financial obligations that I felt well and truly mitigated against taking any plunges into the deep end of the working writer pool. And even so, I know there are folks who took the chance, and some of them may have succeeded, but I know myself well enough to know that choice wouldn't work for me.

Writing can be a good job. When things are going well, it's the best there is. When it's not...I'm afraid I'm not one of those who can say that my worst day writing was better than my best day on my day job. My worst days writing are some of my worst days ever because writing's where my heart is. Too much fear. Too many roller coaster highs and lows. I've said it before--the day job is the marriage of convenience, relatively steady and not too exciting. Writing is the love of my life. But it's an inconstant love, capricious and cruel. I don't trust it. I don't trust the business. I don't trust the muse. Not going in without back-up, no the fuck way. I have to have room to maneuver.

I read some of the things that writers post here, and I get scared. Every time I let my mind wander, every time I start to gauge the depth at the deep end and think maybe, I reread those posts.

Comments

[aeriedraconia.livejournal.com]

I'm with you, I don't write fast and my creative brain is waaay fickle and runs off at the slightest sign of troubled waters.
Maybe it does have something to do with starting late. Dunno.

You sound pretty wise to me, there's a lot to be said for having a steady home and enough food. Being a starving artist is for the young or silly ones. :-)

[juliabk.livejournal.com]

Even when I was young, which was before I even started hobby writing, I knew better than to think it was smart to quit your job and try to launch a risky venture with no backup. Writing is the ultimate risky venture. I wrote my first 'intended to be pro' story a couple of months shy of my 40th birthday. I made my first sale that same year. I'm now a few months shy of my 47th birthday. I have made a little money, I have a few tiny royalty checks that come in and I've written and buried a few bad novels. But I didn't quit my day job. And so, I've got a pension coming in a few years. *THAT'S* my backup.

Life takes its toll. Elderly parents to worry about, raising a child, keeping a roof over my daughter's head, dealing with being 'a woman of a certain age' - all this stuff has to come before writing. For me, writing is like an illicit love affair that I have to squeeze into the cracks in my life. It's stolen lunchtime liaisons, late night trysts, lost weekends when my daughter's at her dad's and no one else needs me for anything. (This is almost as bad - we're at my office so the kidling can use the conference table to lay out her stuff so she can put her history fair project together.)

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

Life takes its toll. Elderly parents to worry about, raising a child, keeping a roof over my daughter's head, dealing with being 'a woman of a certain age' - all this stuff has to come before writing.

That's the kicker, at least to me. Admitting that there are more pressing things in life which have to come first because there will be no second chances...

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

You take on the risk you can, the level of uncertainty with which you're comfortable. Some people are smart enough to know their limits going in. I found out mine the hard way, and even now, part of me wants to deny they exist, wants to believe that under the right circumstances, I could just hold my nose and jump.

I don't recall whether it was a panel or simply a conversation during which Kris Rusch set down what she felt were the financial rules for quitting the day job and writing fulltime. House paid off, if possible. No credit card or other installment debt, like a car. Six months or a year of expenses in the bank--can't recall which--and contracts 3 or 5 years out. It was a pretty high bar. I don't know if she's changed it since she first set it.

Manuscript formatting and query letters are easy. Staying in print 15 years down the road and still kicking them out the door every year or so? That's the killer, and even then, it may not be enough. Because it's a full time job's worth of work, but it doesn't pay, for the majority, a full time wage.

[juliabk.livejournal.com]

I think I may have heard her or someone else riff on this. It was fascinating and only reinforced my plan to NOT QUIT MY DAY JOB! ;-)

[buymeaclue.livejournal.com]

I, at least, find it very--not quite reassuring, but soothing, to see other writers saying these things. There's so much out there saying that if writing's not your number one priority, if you aren't willing to give us the rest of your life for it--that then you're not a real writer. Whatever that means.

Which I don't believe, and which I argue against, and which I'd rather deal with, in the end, than the alternative.

But still. It's good to see the other side, too.

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

The thing is--and I could rattle on for days about this--is that writers, like actors and artists, etc--are on the front lines of the entertainment wars. The interface, where things get messy really fast.

Because in one respect, you may need to keep the 'my, art, my life' mindset in order to write a story as you think it should be written, in order to devote the time necessary to getting it right. But you also need to be able to take a step back, IMO, and assess where you are, and where you're going, and what you want from life. Your responsibilities. Your needs. Your health. Writing, however much it means to you, is still only part of who you are. It's an aspect, not a definition.

It's a multidimensional balancing act, and it's hard, because it requires a level of self-knowledge and self-ackonwledgement of abilities and limitations that most people never have to evaluate in themselves. Not only the level of risk you're willing to take on, but whether you will be able to work, be able to function, when those risks begin to reveal themselves and you hear the wolf, be it emotional, financial, or artistic, snuffling at the door.

I believe that you can be a writer and still go through periods where writing doesn't fit in your life, or doesn't merit being a priority. The problem with that is, there are several commercial concerns--publishers, agents, printers--who are one step back from the interface, and who require steady, reliable input of books and stories in order to do their jobs and make their livings and pay their rent. There are contracts that you signed, containing deadlines that seemed quite doable at the time. There are your readers, who have a lot of books and stories to choose from and who may forget about you if they don't hear from you for a time.

The industry is built on a foundation of shifting sand is the problem.

And there are writers who will say that I am full of shit and that you just sit butt-in-chair and pound out the words. And some of them can do that, day in and day out, and God love 'em I wish I had some of their ability, but I don't think I do.

[juliabk.livejournal.com]

Because in one respect, you may need to keep the 'my, art, my life' mindset in order to write a story as you think it should be written, in order to devote the time necessary to getting it right. But you also need to be able to take a step back, IMO, and assess where you are, and where you're going, and what you want from life. Your responsibilities. Your needs. Your health. Writing, however much it means to you, is still only part of who you are. It's an aspect, not a definition.

I find I have no use for 'lit'ry artistes'. Starving for your art sounds nicely romantic, but it's not very bright. Then there's the matter of what someone who has never *done* anything else could possibly have to say. (Yes, there are some who do have a great deal to say that's interesting to the rest of us, but they are, AFAIK the exception rather than the rule.) One of my favorite poems is The Day is Done by Longfellow. There's a passage that pretty much says it best:

Read from some humbler poet,
Whose songs gushed from his heart,
As showers from the clouds of summer,
Or tears from the eyelids start;

Who, through long days of labor,
And nights devoid of ease,
Still heard in his soul the music
Of wonderful melodies.

No one needs stories more than people who struggle to make it through life and who knows better what stories will appeal than the writers among them.

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

Despite the fact that this may be who/what I'm arguing against, the use of the term "lit'ry artistes' bothers me. Someone who is living the starving artist's life and tells me that I should be living it as well is walking the walk. They're sincere. They're just approaching matters in a way I wouldn't at this point, especially with greygirlbeast's posts on the subject rattling in my noggin, especially this:

No matter what you may have heard elsewhere or however you may have romanticized the life of working writers, know this: it is, with very, very few exceptions, a brutal, ugly, and unrelentingly difficult existence. It is a grind, no matter how much you may love to write or feel driven to tell stories.

My real irritation is directed toward the non-writers who would take it upon themselves to question my commitment because I'm not living the writer's life as they believe it should be led. That I would write something for money rather than love or commitment to the work? That's where it gets all messy again, because while I wouldn't be able to write something I didn't feel committed to, I would be hard-pressed at this point in my life to write something, even something I loved, without the prospect of a sale (read: $$) somewhere. Because it's time I will never get back, and I have a job, and a parent, and dogs, and somewhere in there, a private life, and writing is too damned difficult for me to undertake without the chance of receiving some sort of something for my time.

The thing is, I can type until my fingers cramp, and it won't make a bit of difference. Prospective writers will need to make up their own minds, and if they're bound and determined, nothing I say will stop them, which is the way it is. Nothing I heard or saw stopped me, either. The experts-I-will-always-have-with-me will consider me uncommitted, or a genre hack, or no one of consequence, or whatever. I consider that after ten years, I finally have a grip on myself, and I guess that's something.

[juliabk.livejournal.com]

Someone who is living the starving artist's life and tells me that I should be living it as well is walking the walk.

If they *are* actually doing it, then they're not what I consider a 'lit'ry artiste'. The ones I slap that phrase on are the ones who dabble because they can (meaning they have an income from somewhere). They consider themselves above anyone who doesn't quit their jobs and write full time and choose to 'suffer for their art'. These are the ones who think it would be romantic to be a starving artist and if only their husbands didn't make so much money they'd do it, too, by golly. They sell nothing because 'the world isn't ready for their vision'.

Cliche? Yeah. I've met far too many of them.

Someone who manages to find a way to keep body and soul together as a full time writer has my respect. I may think they're insane for trying it, but I'll be nothing but envious if they can do it. Like you, I'm far too risk averse to consider it without an additional source of income.

[juliabk.livejournal.com]

Forgot something.

In my experience, the ones who can make it have had life experiences before they try. They're not coming in as a blank slate (again, a certain individual comes to mind as an exception).

[daveamongus.livejournal.com]

I think that's why I'm looking into the slightly-more-predictable world of commercial writing, where one's workmanlike prose rather than the flower of creativity does the heavy lifting financially.

I have no idea if it will work which is why, right now, it's just something extra to pay off a couple of bills early. Assuming the company cutting checks to me doesn't, you know, find it hard to pay me, or something like that. But I figured a while ago that a) I've got too many stories I want to write and, especially working in the IT field, I won't get to all the ones in my mind right now until 2012. If I want to get them on paper, I have to make more time in my life for it, and right now the time taken up by the dayjob looks mighty attractive.

And I've got that extra-scary factor of offspring to consider. Which means, if anything, I'm on a multi-year plan to quitting the dayjob (or, at least, scaling it back a bit). Nothing else is remotely responsible, much less feasible.

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

But I figured a while ago that a) I've got too many stories I want to write and, especially working in the IT field, I won't get to all the ones in my mind right now until 2012. If I want to get them on paper, I have to make more time in my life for it, and right now the time taken up by the dayjob looks mighty attractive.

I've got two multi-book thingies--one trilogy, one who-knows--in mind, and something very different that Madame Agent has advised I would need to complete prior to submission because it would be submitted to a market where no one knows me. So, yeah, 2012, easy. I'll be *ack* 54 by then, and I am quite aware of the saying that production starts to slack off around 60.

And I know how quickly the time goes. I've been thinking about a lot of things lately.

I have to go into this on my terms. The will-anyone-buy-what-I-have-to-sell worry comes last of all.

[daveamongus.livejournal.com]

Sweet. We'll check in with each other in six years, see where we're at. ;)

It's amazing, really, the things that just sort of pop into one's head. At this point, I can still revel in the idea of a new novel or long story... but at some point soon it's going to be accompanied with: "Damn... how many years of writing and rewriting per novel?"

I've heard John Ringo can crank them out in a matter of weeks. I so much want to be like him... and yet... not so much.

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

I've heard John Ringo can crank them out in a matter of weeks. I so much want to be like him... and yet... not so much.

The marketplace favors a certain type of writer, and if you're not that type, you're left wondering if you can ever keep your head above water, much less excel.

I'm hoping that the small presses continue to develop, and that online markets multiply so that there are outlets for writers who produce steadily, but more slowly.

[juliabk.livejournal.com]

I'll be *ack* 54 by then, and I am quite aware of the saying that production starts to slack off around 60.

I'm always suspicious of such things. *Why* does production slack off then? Is it health? Well, if your health is good, then that shouldn't be a factor. Is it that the writer's spouse is retired/children grown and now there are other things to focus on? Again, if this isn't an issue, it's not an issue.

I would ignore such doom-saying and just keep on going. I'm still dying to read Magpie. ;-)

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

I heard it second-hand. The person who said it is someone I was once affiliated with business-wise. Pronouncements like that are one reason why I no longer am affiliated with them.

[juliabk.livejournal.com]

Ah! Smart woman.

[juliabk.livejournal.com]

So, yeah, 2012, easy. I'll be *ack* 54 by then,

Sweetpea, you're only two years older than I am. Stop it with the age angst! :-) We're not that old! Well, my joints *are* that old, but the rest of me is doing ok. Go. Play with a puppy. You'll feel better.

[hoosier-red.livejournal.com]

Technically (ha) I am a working writer, in that my day job, when I have one, is "technical writer." The fact that I don't have one at the moment, however, is doing unpleasant things to my stomach lining; the thought of going whole hog as a fiction writer is bloody terrifying.

I also have the same issues as you -- I don't write well when I'm upset (about finances, websites, you name it), and I tend to be slow, which doesn't lend itself to lots of material in circulation. I wish it were otherwise, but it isn't and I'm of the age where I need to think about things like retirement, long-term care, etc., so I'm sucking it up and keeping the day job as security.

It does help to look at Elizabeth Moon, though -- she sold her first novel when she was forty, and twenty years later she's finally living off her writing and can devote her spare time to rehabilitating her land. Personally, I find that extremely inspiring.

[juliabk.livejournal.com]

Elizabeth is incredibly inspiring no matter how you look at it. Talk about a great role model. She even taught me how to make bread properly (not that she realized she was teaching me at the time ;-).

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

She is inspiring. But she's posted enough about her own ups and downs, her fears and concerns.

[juliabk.livejournal.com]

Oh, yeah, but that's encouraging to me. It lets me know that I don't have to be some perfect being to maybe, one day, be able to sell enough that I don't have to take a part-time job at Walmart to supplement my pension. ;-)