Getting By on a Writer's Income

Recently, to give you all a taste of one of the new books for writers I ePublished in 2011, I posted a Writer's Digest column of mine ("Writing, Always Writing") from The Liar's Companion. Enough of you responded enthusiastically to prompt me to Do It Again.

So here's a piece that originally appeared in 1981 in an annual publication, Writer's Yearbook. Dated references notwithstanding, I'd have to say it's held up well. The points it makes seem as valid as ever, and the concerns it addresses have certainly not gone away.

I was grateful for the opportunity to include it in The Liar's Bible, and I'm happy to share it here...

GETTING BY ON A WRITER'S INCOME

A writer, James Michener has said, can make a fortune in America. But he can’t make a living.

I think the point is good. It’s hardly a secret that a few people get rich every year at their typewriters. The same media attention that 50 years ago lionized a handful of writers as important cultural leaders now trumpets the income of a comparable handful. The tabloid reader knows nowadays about paperback auctions and movie tie-ins and multi-volume book contracts with sky-high advances and elevator clauses.

Balanced against this image of the writer as fortune’s darling is a similarly glamorous picture of the unsuccessful writer starving in an airless garret, eating baked beans out of the can and pawning his overcoat to buy carbon paper. The poor blighter’s starving for his art, and he’ll either go on starving in pursuit of his pure artistic vision until they lay his bones in potter’s field, or else he’ll suddenly break through to literary superstardom, and the next we’ll see of him he’ll be at poolside sipping champagne and snorting lines with the Beautiful People.

The validity of both of these images notwithstanding, most of the writers I know have never gotten rich but have always gotten by. This has certainly been the case with me. I have, to be sure, had good years and bad years. I had a couple of years when I made more money than I knew what to do with—although I always thought of something—and I had other years, and rather more of them, when I might have switched to another line of work had there been anything else for which I was qualified.

I did live in a garret once, in a rather pleasant area under a sloping roof atop a barbershop in Hyannis, Massachusetts. For a couple of weeks I subsisted solely on peanut butter sandwiches and Maine sardines, and I wrote a short story every day, one of which ultimately became my first sale. (The room was $8 a week, the sardines were 15¢ a can, and I got a hundred bucks for the story...)

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