The Insult of Being Called an Amateur Writer

Amongst writers it is a well-known fact that the majority of us can’t earn enough just from our writing to give up all other forms of employment. There are a lucky few but not nearly as many as those of us wanting to join those few would like. It doesn’t mean we give up on writing. It just means we supplement our incomes with other work like editing, teaching and more often than not jobs that have absolutely no link to what it is we’d much rather be doing.

In 2014, I was lucky enough to be able to begin three years in which I spent the majority of my time writing my own work full-time. During the times I wasn’t writing my own work, I was employed as a writer writing for others (six months here, six weeks there but for less than a year of those three years). Prior to that, I spent six-and-a-half years as a corporate writer and before that, I was a textbook editor for three years. I even have two postgraduate writing degrees.

And in the past five years, I’ve published three books, written two more, ghost-written another, written and published over 400 blog posts, and written and published about two dozen articles, one of which had over 10,000 views on LinkedIn. I was even shortlisted for the 2016 Text Prize for my upcoming novel, Black Spot, and it was a point of pride for me when one of Text Publishing’s employees told me my book wouldn’t need an editor because I’d done such a good job.

So imagine my surprise when, as I sat right beside him, my father told a group of his friends and acquaintances that I was an “amateur writer”.

We were having dinner, catching up after not having seen each other for a while, when someone I was meeting for the first time asked what I did and when I replied, “I’m a writer,” he added, “An amateur writer.”

“No,” I challenged him, a little bit stunned in light of all of my achievements, “I’m a professional writer.”

I know why he said it. Because this year, I went back to full-time work that has nothing to do with writing because I couldn’t afford not to anymore and because I didn’t want to expend my writing energy on projects I didn’t care about (not my own) so I chose not to take on a writing job.

I’ve found it refreshing. It’s easy, the people are lovely and the pay is steady. But it has meant that I haven’t done nearly as much writing as I’ve been able to in previous years. But does it make me any less of a writer? Any less of a professional? With three more books coming out in the next three years, I don’t think so. But apparently my father does. And I suspect it is entirely to do with the financial aspect.

I have sales here and there and royalties are constantly trickling in but apart from those heady first few weeks after one of my books is released, it’s never more than a trickle, certainly not enough for someone paying a home loan to live off. I always think even that trickle is amazing considering I do little to no marketing (telling those people at that dinner party that I was a writer was the most marketing I’d done in six months).

It’s funny that so much of what we think of ourselves is filtered through what our family thinks of us. But in most cases, families have no real understanding of what we do on a day-to-day basis or how we are perceived in our careers, regardless of whatever it is we do. Even now that I’m working a full-time job again, I still run my own business after hours. That includes my writing (both fiction and non-fiction), and writing, editing, proofreading and project managing primarily marketing materials for others. I don’t really talk about my freelance work with my family, mostly because I don’t think it’s all that interesting.

But I get paid for it. Maybe I should talk about it more. Or maybe that’s just self-indulgent. Maybe it shouldn’t matter how much I earn or what my father thinks. But for someone reason, it does. The part about what my father thinks anyway. I want him to be proud of me. And more importantly, I want him to understand that I’m actually doing well at this. Sure, I’m not in the realms of JK Rowling and it’s not likely I ever will be, but that’s not really the goal I’ve set for myself, probably because I’m not a big picture or big goal kind of person.

I started out just wanting to write a book. And when I achieved that, I set a goal to publish it. After I published, my new goal was to write another book. And when it was finished, my next goal was to publish it. I think you can see the pattern. Nowhere in my goal-setting did getting paid huge sums of money for my writing ever become a goal. That’s probably because I’m a realist and because I know it’s unlikely. If it ever happens, it will be a bonus.

If it doesn’t, that won’t make me any less of a writer or any less of a professional. I guess my next goal is to help my father see it, too.