Here's a charming little comment from a writer:
Writing has ruined my life and cost me many, many girlfriends. I have thrown away several careers and one college degree to spend my time working in bars, D.J.'ing in bars and drinking my rejection letters away. I wouldn't wish this on my worst enemy, and I've made many of them since I started...I also abandoned my agent with words harsher than those I've saved for lost loves."
It's courtesy 25 year old Brendan Sullivan as quoted in the New York Observer under a headline "My Book Deal Ruined My Life".
You have got to be kidding me.
Daniel Smith got a book deal to write about his deceased father who heard voices in his head and then found the actual writing of the book so difficult that “I thought about getting into painting houses or digging ditches, doing anything other than writing—making watches or something like that.� Spoken like someone who has never dug a ditch in his life. If he had, trust me - he wouldn't be thinking of it as something easier.
Here's another fun bit about what you miss by becoming a fulltime writer with a contract:
The freedom of setting one’s own schedule, of course, is another gift of the book contract—for some, it’s the very motivation to pitch a book in the first place. Work for a few hours, go to yoga, work a little more, eat a sandwich …. It’s a fantasy of independence, without daily or weekly deadlines imposed from above, without being picked at by your nosy co-worker. But then…You miss the co-worker: the ruminations on last night’s Sopranos at the coffee machine, the bitching about deadlines over lunch. You even long for their Z100 sing-alongs and screeching renditions of “Since U Been Gone.�
Um, what? You miss bitching about deadlines - someone else's deadlines, someone else's idea of what is important? You miss coffee machine discussions about tv? Are you in solitary confinement or something from the moment you sign a contract? No one told me this. I thought you just continue writing like you did before and still have your life.
Hello, published authors - you do still have your lives to keep, don't you?
But then again maybe what Rachel Sklar did is what writers under contract are supposed to do:
Ms. Sklar took six weeks off from her blogging job to uniform herself in fuzzy sweatpants, tie her hair into a bun, surround herself in books from the library and Amazon.com, guzzle Diet Coke and immerse herself in Jewry.
“The stack of books kept me where I was. I wasn’t going out, I wasn’t shopping …. I berated myself and may have had a few meltdowns. Well, I definitely had a few meltdowns. But you know, a friend of mine came over at 1:30 [after] a movie premiere with a six-pack of Diet Coke and a box of cupcakes, and it was the greatest pick-me-up ever.�
Um, I wrote an entire book while wearing functional clothing, eating and drinking like a normal person and interacting on a daily basis with my husband and child (and dogs and assorted other family members). I never put my hair in a bun; I would have remembered if the bun thing happened.
And then there is Anna Holmes, who is probably going to win for cliche of the week, commenting on life after the book was done:
“I had a hard time getting myself back into my quote-unquote normal life, because I actually started enjoying my [own] company so much and the solitude of it all. I didn’t even want to go out,� Ms. Holmes continued. “I still tend to kind of want to be at home and read and, you know, [become] a cat lady, with my cats.�
Of course it figures that she is a blogger also. If she lived in Terra Haute I might scream or something.
And then there is the issue of the advance, which apparently is not really much:
“When I hear a book deal, I think, ‘Oh, that person made a 100 grand.’ When I have a low-five-figure advance, I call it, like, a small gift, I suppose,� said Ms. Holmes.
She also learned that her publisher wouldn’t pay for the rights to print the breakup letters she wanted to include in the collection. “The advance I got was not money that I could live on; it was money that had to be used to pay permissions for the book,� she said.
Although Mr. Smith said he was able to survive on his advance, he admits that those six-figure deals can quickly dwindle away over the three or four years it takes to write a book. “You’re basically making 30 or 40 grand a year, and that’s not that great of a salary …. It’s really not as much as it seems. These numbers can be very deceptive.�
And poor Brendan? He is really having a rough time:
Mr. Sullivan has held 27 jobs to support his writing career, from selling chapstick on the street to being a night guard in an art gallery (“That was my favorite job ever, because I just sat in a chair and read novels all day,� Mr. Sullivan added.)
He is currently working on his second novel. His first one, well, “There are eight drafts of it—they’re in my basement right now,� he said in a phone interview from his Fort Greene apartment. He trashed the novel after he got into a public fight with his first agent and decided to start anew. “You have to learn how to suppress your gag reflex in order to get anything out. Like in love, you make a lot of mistakes and you learn from them.�
Okay, you already know what I think about all this (I can't keep the sarcasm to myself, even when quoting), but let me explain why I have no pity for writers who support themselves through writing. My father was a wastewater treatment plant supervisor. He worked in sewage almost his entire adult life (more than 30 years). He had acidic chemicals splashed on his face once, he wore steel toe boots because of dropping manhole covers and he died at the age of 60, after a diagnosis similar to several co-workers, from a cancer that no one could explain - except that maybe some of the chemicals he worked with over his career had killed him.
That is hard work.
My pepere drove an oil delivery truck for FIFTY years in Rhode Island. He showed up and drove no matter the weather - no matter the blizzard - because people depended on him; his family depended on him.
That is hard work.
My great grandfather, who I never met, left Canada for the US to give his children a better way of life. He was a farmer who moved to town and a carpenter who could not support his family through his craft. So he worked the textile mills in Rhode Island in the 1920s and 30s. Have you read stories about those mills? People died in those places.
That is hard work.
I agree that writing is not easy - and I know from first hand experience that it is hard. But there is a whale of difference between something being hard and it being hard work. Sitting in a clean house, with heat and food and running water while you create something of your own making - while you let your imagination run loose and take you places you never thought possible - that is pleasure; that is beauty.
In the grand scheme of things, that is damn easy.
Research might be tedious, deadlines might be frightful, staying up late at night to pound the keys might be tiring but do not think for a minute that any of this constitutes hard work. If you have seen hard work, lived with it, practiced it, maybe even lost your heart and soul to it, then you would know the difference.
You would know why I have no pity for writers who whine.
Loading airplanes at 40 below zero is hard work but I had it easy. I could always walk inside to my desk and my heater and let the guys do it; I was just helping - the rampers had to be out there. And doing the job in Fairbanks is nothing compared to loading airplanes - fueling airplanes - at the top of the world with a wind chill of 120 below zero and sky that has not seen daylight in months. That is bitter, brutal, back breaking work.
It will even make you a little bit crazy.
I remember when that work was what my friends did and I was the one who sent them to do it. And now I write about it at my table, with my glass of ice tea and the radio in the background and the dog asleep at my feet. The day I sign a book contract I will be grateful and I will be happy but even then I will be remembering.
In a just world the first phone call after that news would be to my father, to thank him for all those years doing hard work he hated so his kids could have better. But I believe he will know anyway; it's the sort of thing I have to believe he will know. And he will understand why I'm telling you right now that writing is one of the easiest jobs I've ever had.
"...30 or 40 grand a year, and that's not a great salary..." Then go get a hard job dear writer, and see how tough working for that salary can be.
June 7
2007
05:42 AM
Thank you. For one teeny moment, I felt like whining today. Now I'm picturing your boot in my butt if I do.
Could you design a "No Whining" logo that writers could post on their websites/blogs?