By John Gilstrap
I posted here a few weeks ago that I am recovering from surgery on my lumbar spine–a two-level hemilaminectomy. (I just like the way the word sounds.) The surgery was successful, but like any invasion of one’s musculature and nervous system, recovery takes time. For me, that means resuming normal activity with one big asterisk: If what I’m doing at any time, whether walking, doing yard work, or shooting at the range, if the activity starts to hurt too much, I am to stop. There is no glory to be gained by pushing through the pain. Doing so today will just make tomorrow suck.
This advice occurred to me the other day as I was reading a piece posted on Medium entitled, “Write Like the Rent Is Due Next Week” by Felicia C. Sullivan. The piece begins,
My rent is due on Monday. I’ve listed four maxi dresses while shoveling down buttered pasta for breakfast. Refreshed my eBay store at least seven times in the past hour. I scan my home like a thief. What else can I sell?
The fascinating, extraordinarily well-written piece goes on at length to tell us that Felicia was “born to tell stories” while lamenting that “the romantic writer life” was a sham unless you had parents folding fat bills into your hands.” No one
told me how far you’ll have to hustle to live with integrity. If I didn’t take the fancy marketing gigs, I’d have to hustle like my life depended on it. . . . I’d draft first lines while praying the ache in my mouth I’ve been ignoring won’t turn into another $3,000 root canal.
And then there’s this:
Creating art in the barbaric slaughterhouse that is late-stage capitalism, while you’re wondering how far and wide you can stretch a single dollar — it’s not romantic or noble, it’s messy, often erratic, and filled with crippling self-doubt.
Truly artistic writers, we learn, can no longer make a living, in large measure due to:
dwindling attention spans and an audience seal-clapping for simple prose. Easy stories. Happy endings.
Yes, ladies and gentlemen of the Readerverse, your selfish desire to be entertained by what you read is forcing some navel-gazing Bohemian aspirants into the position where they must consider the horror of, you know, getting a job outside their own minds and interact with three-dimensional people who exist beyond their laptops.
Want to make money off of your writing?
Dear writers and musicians and artists of all stripes: Get over your precious selves. I am 100% with you when you claim that the thing you create is art–even if it’s ugly or I don’t understand it. The imagination superhighway has no lanes. Let your colors and your chords and your characters run wherever they take you. That’s the beauty of art. It literally has no bounds, no definition.
The instant you put a price tag on it, though, and try to sell it to me, your art becomes a product, and you’ve surrendered the command chair to everyone else but you. If your masterpiece is a self-indulgent, depressing expose of your inner demons and you don’t care about “seal-clapping” readers, good on you. Just expect to sell fewer copies than the author who considers himself and entertainer and writes a potboiler targeting the largest possible audience.
This shouldn’t hurt.
When I read the angst inherent to Ms. Sullivan’s prose, which is amplified severalfold by some of the comments, I find myself confused. If it all hurts that much, why do it? Why not take a break from it? To posit that she’s “born” to inflict this kind of emotional pain on herself makes no more sense to me than to posit that one can be born to pull one’s fingernails out.
Precious few writers ply their craft full time, and one who’s very close to me chose to go back to a day job just to break the claustrophobia of fulltime writing.
Life is about priorities.
I cannot imagine a circumstance where writing would ever be the first priority in my life. That slot belongs to family, always and forever. And you can’t take care of your family if you can’t pay the rent. If you can’t pay the rent without having a day job, well, I guess that day job needs to be pretty high on the priority list, doesn’t it?
By way of shameless self-promotion, I’ve reactivated my YouTube channel, A Writer’s View of Writing and Publishing, with an episode focused on the very topic of Setting Your Priorities As A Writer. I invite you to give it a look if you get a chance.
Well said, Brother Gilstrap. One writer’s “barbaric slaughterhouse” (a rather overripe description) is another writer’s stream of income (be it Starbucks money, rent money, or beyond).
That’s why I’ve always admired the pulp writers of old, who viewed writing as a job as well as a skill. They had no illusions or fanciful dreams. They had to write what people wanted to read if they wanted to make some dough. A fair exchange for a product. Imagine that.
I hope and pray that you make a full recovery. Sitting down at a computer to write is never great for my aging back and neck, I do it for fun.
The image of “clapping like seals” reminds me of a road trip in California. My wife and I stopped at a turnoff to eat a sandwich. We heard loud barking in the distance and wondered why Californians had so many loose dogs. Looking down at the Paciific we saw a colony of sea lions debating about seating on the rocks,
Signed: two hicks from Virginia.
Reminds me: There used to be a famous seal on San Franciso’s Pier 39 known as Hoover. His distinctive bark actually sounded like he was yelling out “Hoover here!” Saw and heard him. I suspect he’s long gone but not forgotten. I believe there was another Hoover in Boston harbor. “Hoover” apparently is easy for a seal to pronounce.
While I’m sorry for Felicia’s struggles, I also feel for the dishwasher, house cleaner, and senior citizen looking around their homes for items to sell to pay rent, buy medicine, and shop for shoes for the grandchildren they didn’t expect they’d have to raise.
Suffering for one’s art sounds romantic but it isn’t more noble than other people’s struggles.
The reality is a busker with an open guitar case on a street corner probably earns more per day than most writers do from writing. There’s a reason for the old cliche: “Don’t quit your day job.”
Thumbs up to your priorities on YouTube, John.
I agree, John. There’s a high price to be paid for being a starving artist in a garret, while a steady income from a day job can be a literal lifesaver. By the same token, not quitting that day job can keep you and your family afloat, and yourself on an even keel as a writer.
Then, you carve out time for your writing and write. It’s not easy, but it’s worth it.
Great stuff here, John!
Dear writers and musicians and artists of all stripes: Get over your precious selves.
And…
I cannot imagine a circumstance where writing would ever be the first priority in my life. That slot belongs to family, always and forever.
Heading over to your channel now. Have a good day.
Wonder if she’s a Millennium or Gen-xer? She’s certainly not a baby-boomer born of parents raised in the Depression. Not saying those born in the later era feel entitlement…or maybe I am. A lot of them want what their parents have after working all their lives–they want to start of with it.
I knew when I started this writing gig it wouldn’t provide enough income for me to quit my day job so I worked and wrote around it. And I gave my readers what they wanted which just happened to be what I liked to write–commercial fiction–romantic suspense with a HEA.
Signed,
A seal clapper
Creating art in the barbaric slaughterhouse that is late-stage capitalism reminds me of the kid who isn’t doing well in school and blames it on his teacher and his parents.
I like your emphasis on life priorities, John. Plenty of writers support themselves with a day job. Didn’t Paul work as a tent maker while spreading the gospel?
Maybe I’m weird. No I am weird. But I don’t worry about creating art. That is a decision for others to make about what I write. John is right the family and even living a decent life is more important than art. I don’t feel sorry for “the writer”. I worked for over fifty years at jobs I didn’t much like. Sometimes I succeeded but most of the time I failed to do a great job. That’s on me, but my first wife and two daughters never missed a meal. I’m not a hero, just an ordinary guy, now retired and writing and enjoying my weirdness. I earned it. So did most of you who read this.
Well spoken!
This is surprisingly hard to get across to people who’ve put Art way up on a pedestal and then have trouble finding a ladder tall enough to let them join it.
I use a simple assumption to cut to the chase, which I’ll state in four variations: “It’s not about me, it’s about the story. The story isn’t about me, it’s about itself. Writing is one of the things I do, it’s not who I am.” Plus a bonus assumption: “Any discussion of Art that ignores or disparages the audience is ipso facto wrong.”
I’m not sure how many sufferers are willing to hear this.
Reminds me of a woman I met years ago at the Miami Book Fair. We were on a mystery panel together. Someone asked the panel a question akin to: Who is your audience?
I remember saying something about being sensitive to who — or maybe what type of reader — you are aiming for, ie: just be aware of genre expectations. The woman shot back: “I don’t write for anyone. I don’t write to make money. I write to please myself.”
I think there’s a rather graphic term for that.
Here’s to your quick recovery, from another bad-back sufferer who needs to now put down the laptop, get off her butt and do her PT exercises.
When I was playing around with this writing gig, I belonged to a local RWA chapter. The advice going around was until you had enough money stashed away to live on for 5 years, don’t quit the day job.
So instead of getting a job, she is willing to sell her things for her “art.” A young woman who is poorly prepared for life as an adult.
I work to pay the bills and, as I prefer, my writing, is done when I can fit it in after cleaning the house, taking care of the dogs and horses, and a husband who is dying of gastric cancer. I “retired” in 2014 but ended up going back to work to have a few nice things beyond my monthly check. I don’t regret working after finding a job where I love what I do and work hours that allow me time to write.
Family and home are priorities and writing is something I enjoy doing and that I’ve sandwiched between traveling for 18 months, moving clear across the country, and setting up a new home. I have no sympathy for anyone who puts their “art” above living. She will eventually run out of things to sell.