I recently received an e-mail from a woman who is, like me, middle-aged. She got my e-mail address from an issue of The Sun in which my story "Blue Velvis" appeared. She's intelligent, well educated, well read. She spent a long time studying to prepare herself for a job she ultimately hated, but that paid well. She loves to write, has always wanted to be a writer.
She is in that writer's limbo--that place where she's created stories that are "almost there" but nobody seems to be able to explain to her why they aren't getting published when she sends them out.
She asked me some questions about writing, and I told her if she didn't mind, I'd answer her questions in this journal.
She didn't mind, so here we go.
One of the questions she asked was about the present rate at which writers are paid. She wondered what I thought about it. Well, I don't like it, but there isn't anything I can do about it.
The truth is, the opportunities for publication are shrinking. I just recently saw that The Atlantic, one of the last holdouts for fiction, is cutting out its monthly fiction offering. (Although, the fiction editor says, once a year a special fiction issue will probably publish as many stories as they would have throughout the year anyway; we'll see).
Not only are there fewer magazines publishing fiction, the pay is slim to nil in most cases. Most literary magazines pay writers in copies; a few do pay a small amount, almost always under $100. Commercial publications like The New Yorker pay better, but it's hard, nearly impossible, to break into The New Yorker. The Sun, a non-profit magazine with NO ADVERTISING, is actually one of the few magazines to pay its writers a decent price for their fiction and essays--$600-plus per story. (This is because the editor, Sy Safransky, moves in the world in an entirely ethical manner. Those of you who have read The Sun and know the history of the magazine understand how hard he worked to make the magazine into what it is today.)
Also, publishing houses are forming huge conglomerates. The small presses are being bought up by the large presses, who are driven by the blockbuster mentality, creating fewer and fewer opportunities for the first-time novelist.
The upshoot: Most of us who write don't make a living off our writing. Only a precious few do that--the rest of us, we write because we must. We secure our finances by other means.
Even if you publish a novel, the chances are you won't make much money off of it. This is the truth: If I added up my advance and royalty payments and then subtracted the money I spent traveling in order to promote the book (not even to mention the hours and hours I spent writing the book), I wouldn't do much more than break even at this point. Few first-time novelists sell more than 1000 books. My print run was 5000 and fewer than half of those have been sold (that is including libraries, which accounted for the majority of my sales). Then consider the used book market--the writer gets no money when her book is sold as used. Amazon is even selling review copies of my novel, which were given away to book reviewers. The review copies are missing key scenes, so those readers aren't even getting the full reading experience that I intended. The whole thing is maddening.
So you quickly see that even after your book is finished, accepted, and published, you still can't count on it as a form of financial compensation.
Now, let's talk of better things.
Let's talk about being a writer. Calling ourselves that--writers. Being able to understand why, in the face of all the defeat and lack of material compensation, we still want to write.
In her e-mail, the woman who read "Blue Velvis" and wanted to talk to me about writing told me she has read Brenda Ueland, John Gardner's books on writing, and a plethora of other "how to" books on craft. She wrote to me:
"Each time I think this one is going to do it, this one is going to remove that last barrier, and while I'm reading them, I often believe it will be the case. Then, I reach the last page, put the book down, and still face the same problems as before."
And now, here is where I have to get real. I can't pretend to have an answer for all writers. I can just tell you how things happened for me. I found that the "last barrier" was something that no book could break, only I could break it. The "last barrier" was my dragon that I had to slay. Everybody's dragon is different. Mine was my inability to write from my heart because I thought I was so insignificant or naive or clueless or fill in the blank that nobody would care what I had to say. My dragon said, "You can't write a book. You aren't smart enough. You aren't good enough. Nobody will care. It will end up in the slush pile. Think of all the people who write books that are never published. Some of those people write better than you do, and they aren't published. What makes you think anybody is going to publish you?"
And on and on.
For years I wrote what I thought others wanted to read, what I thought would impress others. My writing wasn't "true." Although the writing was proficient, even good in places, it didn't speak to readers because I didn't have the right investment in it.
I know that all writers invest a lot in terms of time, effort, sweat, and blood. But I found that I had to put everything on the line when I wrote, put my head on the chopping block with my future reader holding the axe. Nothing could come between me and the truth I needed to tell, the truth my reader needed to read. It was the idea of "truth" that helped me to slay my dragon.
I think everybody first has to find their dragon, then they have to kill it.
I hope the woman who e-mailed me will hang in there. She seems passionate about writing. Persistence is all. I know that what I've said in this entry doesn't paint authorship in a very positive light--but that's only if you're thinking about it in terms of material wealth. There are other kinds of wealth. Brenda Ueland says that even if you never publish any of your writing, it's still important that you wrote. She says:
[William] Blake used to say, when his energies were diverted from his drawing or writing, "that he was being devoured by jackals or hyenas."
Ueland also tells the story of when Van Gogh was young and in London and was writing a letter to his younger brother in Holland. Van Gogh looked out the window and saw a lampost and a star and it was so beautiful. In his letter, Van Gogh wrote, "It is so beautiful I must show you how it looks."
And, Ueland says, "on his cheap ruled note paper, he made the most beautiful, tender, little drawing of it." The creative impulse came out of a need to share something beautiful. I believe if we follow this as a goal, we can't go wrong. I held this thought as I wrote through 6 long years I spent working on The Secret of Hurricanes. I thought of Van Gogh making that little drawing for his brother and thought of my writing as doing the same sort of thing, putting my whole heart into something because it mattered to me.
You might publish your book and make a million dollars; but the chances are better that you won't.
So you need to remind yourself of this: you write because you love to write. You need to write. Somebody else needs to read what you write. And you need to let the rest (hopes of fame, glory, or even making ends meet off your writing) go.
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