A SAD STORY
Making a living as a writer has always been precarious, but it seems even more so now,
Awards season has arrived, with its generous helpings of anxiety and hope. Every year, a handful of writers are plucked from obscurity (or poverty-stricken notoriety), and delivered fat prize cheques and robust book sales — and, thus, the ability to keep writing.
But that literary lottery remains a fantasy for all but a few, and, in an era of stagnant wages and runaway housing costs, the writing life is increasingly out of reach.
In September, Toronto’s Soraya Roberts, author of In My Humble Opinion: My So-Called Life, polled long-form writers on Twitter, to see how many were supporting themselves with this work. Only 15 per cent were. Fifty-four per cent had day jobs; 31per cent were subsidized by parents or partners.
Indeed, John Degen, executive director of the Writers’ Union of Canada, says the organization’s latest numbers show the average Canadian writer earns less that $13,000 a year from their work.
In recent weeks, Vancouver Magazine editor Jessica Barrett went viral with a poignant personal essay for the Tyee, detailing how the city’s unaffordability crisis led to daily anxiety attacks, and, ultimately, a move to Calgary, while Toronto writer and editor Emily M. Keeler published a moving meditation on overwork for the Literary Review of Canada.
The writing life, of course, has never been easy, but even a generation ago, authors could still envision one day supporting themselves with their writing. But changes to Canadian copyright law in 2012 led to a decrease in the amount of licensing fees writers received, which had often been a source of long-term income (an issue the Writer’s Union has been advocating around).
Even a few decades ago, an upward trajectory wasn’t unheard of. Big breaks were still, if not probable, at least possible. Stateside, this dynamic was even more pronounced.
Consider this: in 1992, David Sedaris, a Christmas elf at Macy’s in New York City, performed a piece at an open mic night, catching the attention of NPR producer Ira Glass, who commissioned it for an on-air essay. As Sedaris’s recent Theft By Finding: Diaries 1977-2002 illustrates, “Santaland Diaries” provided him with an overnight audience, regular radio work and, not long after, a book deal.
This is significant for several reasons. First, it’s astonishing that a person was once able to support themselves in New York doing seasonal work at a department store. Second, “Santaland Diaries” paid $500, more than you would now earn for a similar radio segment, 25 years later. And third, Sedaris was 36 years old when all this happened. Until then, he’d been travelling, doing odd jobs, attending art school and, in his ample spare time, doing drugs and hanging out at IHOP. Sedaris, of course, went on to become a bestselling author, and one of America’s most respected humorists.
His is a story from another time — all but impossible for the current generation of writers.
Take the case of another Boomer luminary, Amy Tan, whose memoir Where the Past Begins: A Writer’s Memoir, hit shelves last month. Tan also came to writing late, picking up the pen at 33. She was then earning a comfortable living as a freelance business writer and already owned her own home. Her first short story appeared in 1986, in the literary magazine FM Five, catching the eye of an agent who offered to represent her, despite the fact that Tan had no intention of writing a book. In1989, at the age of 37, Tan’s The Joy Luck Club was published. She, too, went on to become a bestselling author — one who can afford to live between New York and California, devoted to writing so completely that she does not attend events and parties, or blurb books, when she’s working on a project.
Fast forward two decades, to some of the next generation’s “big breaks.” In a 2014 online essay, Emily Gould, blogger and former Gawker.com editor, recalls selling her debut essay collection, And The Heart Says Whatever, in 2008 for $200,000, on the strength of her online buzz. By 2012, it had flopped, she’d spent her advance on splurges such as rent, taxes and health insurance, and was earning $7,000 a year doing freelance writing and teaching yoga. She sold her next book, 2014’s Friendship: A Novel, for just $30,000, and promptly got a full-time job to “slowly repay the debts I incurred by imagining that writing was my livelihood.”
It’s a state of affairs that writers the world over are grappling with, says one of the world’s leading literary critics, John Freeman, who’s just published a powerful anthology, Tales of Two Americas: Stories of Inequality in a Divided Nation. The book includes writing from Roxanne Gay, Ann Patchett, Juan Felipe Herrera and Rebecca Solnit, and tales of selling blood plasma to pay off student loans, surviving childhoods in trailer parks, living above homeless shelters, earning income mowing the lawns of foreclosed homes and watching young neighbours ship off to war.
“It wasn’t a surprise what came in, but it was still a bit clobbering to read those pieces, one after another — to realize how precarious much of life in the United States feels,” Freeman told the Star at the Vancouver Writers Fest.
Social mobility is deeply unlikely these days, he says, and everyone — including writers — is suffering for it.
“The typical writer journey of having a big break is less and less happening, because culture in the age of the internet is assumed to be free,” he says. “So the big breaks you get are visibility breaks. You can have an essay that gets lots of traffic, but you don’t get paid for that. The company that posts the piece gets paid for that. So we have a serious issue about how we’re going to nurture our writers.”
Freeman says numerous factors now jeopardize the writing life, including real estate. “The idea that we can live in the centre cities of the world now, and write, is becoming increasingly a fantasy. Whether it’s Vancouver or New York, it’s just too expensive to do that unless you have a private income, or you work your butt off doing something else.”
And this points to another problem: the fact that stable day jobs are a thing of the past.
Another young anthology editor, Manjula Martin, addressed this in Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living. She notes the culture of overwork has accelerated so much in our lifetime that nine-to-five jobs no longer exist. In their place? Precarious gigs and contracts that take a tremendous amount of time and energy to manage.
Add to that, the digital revolution has dramatically driven down writing rates and provided an army of young hopefuls willing to write for free.
“If the act of being a writer is continually set up as a hobby, then that drastically narrows the breadth and diversity of the stories that are being written,” Martin told the Star. “That goes across the board, whether you are talking about journalism or literature. If only people who don’t have to get paid are writing, only certain types of people are writing stories, and only certain types of stories are getting written.”
“I think that’s really dangerous,” she says. “It’s dangerous for our culture, our society. As well as for writers.” Tara Henley is a writer and radio producer.
“The typical writer journey of having a big break is less and less happening.” JOHN FREEMAN LITERARY CRITIC