Am I a Writer Yet?
Someone tweeted that old chestnut by Richard Bach today, “A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.” It’s an irritating quotation, like so many, because, while it sounds like a tautology, it is only half true (or some much smaller fraction, in fact). Not quitting is a necessary but not sufficient condition for becoming a professional writer, yet the implication (or at least the inference that people take away) is that all you have to do to be a professional writer is to keep at it. Which, of course, is balderdash.
A true statement, both necessary and sufficient, is that a professional writer is one who is paid for his or her writing. Piling up manuscripts in your bottom draw doesn’t cut it, however long you persist in doing it. But this begs the question, how much do you have to be paid before it counts? Is there a lower limit?
The question bothers me because it’s tax return time here in the Jolly Old Land of Oz and, for the first time ever, I have made enough money from writing fiction to earn above the lower income tax threshold. If this goes on I may have to start attending sci-fi conventions so I have expenses to write off against my earnings. I feel very good about this, as you can imagine. Stubbly with goodness, as Philip Larkin might have remarked. So good that I actually had the nerve to put down my occupation on a form last week as “Writer”.
Sadly, of course, it isn’t true that my occupation is “writer” (even though I went through the rigmarole of applying for an Australian Business Number a short while ago on the advice of a civil servant who was assessing my wife’s eligibility for something and seemed to think it would make everything easier). If it were, I would be living on my earnings rather than using them to help pay a small part of the dog’s vet bills. I don’t think you could say your occupation was “dentist” if you were only paid a few thousand dollars a year and had to rely on other sources of income to buy the groceries and pay the mortgage. You could say you were altruistically filling teeth on a more-or-less charity basis, I suppose.
But I do write, so I’m a writer in that minimal sense. And I do get paid for it (may the gods bless you all), although not enough to (honestly) say it’s my occupation. But am I a professional writer?
It seems to me you can be a professional anything as long as what you do is paid for. But there’s a certain expectation that goes with the word that implies that the thing you’re a professional at is also your occupation, and that, in turn, implies you make enough to live on. And that, here, would be – what? – the social security benefit rate? the minimum wage? the old age pension rate? the average family income? Incredibly, the pittance I made last year by selling books was above some of these benefit levels, so the Government, if no-one else, must think people can live on such a miserable stipend. So they might consider me a professional writer. And that’s probably why they want me to pay tax – because they all live in 1962, when you could buy fish and chips for the family for a shilling.
So, overall, it seems that I’m edging closer to the mark but I’m not quite across it yet. What will this new financial year bring? Who can say? Certainly being a professional writer is not going to be anything like being a professional dentist. The dentist just has to extract one tooth from someone else’s head each hour, eight hours a day, five days a week, 48 weeks a year, and he or she can almost guarantee an income above the maximum tax threshold, a des res in a nice suburb, a car for everyone in the family who wants one, and (if it’s a he) a Harley Davidson to go out posing at the weekends with his mates (yes, they do that). The writer may extract a couple of thousand words a day from his own head with the same dogged dedication, yet there is no guarantee that any of them will be worth a damned thing to anybody.
See? A dentist … on a Harley.
