Use your delusions
You must have seen it unfold on your favourite social media platform: someone announces they are quitting a full-time job, to dedicate to writing full-time — and by “writing” they generally mean “fiction”. You’d expect that this glorification of precarity would prompt calls for an intervention; instead, these posts are regularly met with a chorus of sycophants celebrating the poster’s courage. I’m puzzled by the frequency with which these announcements occur. Either there are more delusional writers than I thought, or too many writers are lucky enough to have a partner in full-time employment, or a wealthy family member willing to settle the bills, until reality inexorably shows its ugly face, and a more realistic career move is deemed necessary.
If I sound bitter, it’s because I am. I’m not only bitter — I’m terribly envious of anyone taking this leap in the dark, however ill-conceived it might be. I’ve been writing for the past thirty years, seriously for the past twenty-five, and I’ve faced a perennial problem all this time: how to make money writing only the things I want to write, without royally fucking up my life and that of my family. This thing — this Substack — is the closest I’ve ever been from getting money regularly that way, and I sometimes wake up in the middle of the night, covered in a cold sweat, worrying that I might be turning into something I hate. Am I corrupting something I love in order to churn out content to a deadline? Am I narcissistic enough to call myself a columnist now?1 I don’t believe I can call myself that, not due to my degree of narcissism, but because if I didn't have a portfolio of minor occupations that make me actual money I’d be living under a bridge. A factotum is what I am. I’m aware that conceding to this isn’t very glamorous, or likely to attract compliments.
Maybe I should try taking the delusional path, see how this pans out. Return to social media, if only just to announce to my followers that I’m abandoning my many hustles, in order to concentrate full-time on writing. Receive the pats on the back, turning a blind eye to the strong possibility that those doing the patting want to see me fail. Then sit down and wait for the brown envelopes to start arriving. Until that happens, the illusion of greatness, the feeling of finally dodging an ordinary life, will be intoxicating.
But I’m either too much of a coward or not careless enough to do anything like this. So today I’ll hustle. And tomorrow I’ll hustle. And the day after tomorrow I’ll hustle too. And so on, until the end of times.
Tiki bar blues
I had this mémoire involontaire the other night.
It’s the year 2000 and I’m playing my electro-acoustic guitar with the volume knob all the way down. I’m singing “Sacrifice” by Elton John, making the lyrics up as I go along, while my friend Pablo pretends to play his keyboard (he’s just triggering midi tracks), and my buddy Alejandro improvises corny phrases here and there with a soprano sax. We are wearing Hawaiian shirts, for the gig is at a tiki bar in the rambla area of Rosario. The money isn’t bad and we get to drink cocktails for free. But in my mind I have totally lost my integrity as a musician. “Sacrifice” isn’t even the worst tune we play, but I have no desire to go over the setlist.
It was a long succession of harrowing paid gigs like this one that spoiled music for me. And I was obsessed with music! From the age of twelve onwards music was the only thing I cared about. I would spend my hours after school practising in my room, my weekends rehearsing with any of many bands, and then, when I ended up in music school, I’d spend eight to ten hours a day, every day, studying for my exams. For years music was the only thing in my life. But for all my love of it, I couldn’t endure the need to play stuff I hated to make a living. Making money from my own songs was out of the equation. The one thing that provided a regular and substantial income was being a primary school teacher, something that as a twenty-something year old seemed unthinkable to me. And that’s how I got myself on a plane and happily went to wash dishes in the kitchens of Ireland. But that’s another story.
My current hustles feel no different from washing dishes, except that they are better paid, thank god for that. And I managed to figure out that I could do these other things before I ruined writing for me trying to make money from it. So maybe I do have an answer to the problem of “how to make money writing only the things I want to write, without royally fucking up my life and that of my family”. The answer is to do something else for cash.
That’s it, I got that right. What’s more, kids, if I could offer you one tip, just one tip for your writing life, it would be this one:
“Figure out how to make money in a way that gives you time to write. Don’t try to make money writing. You’ll suffer miserably. You’ll fail.”
Unless you can either write a bestseller that you don't hate, or churn out narcissistic crap to a deadline without remorse.
Like a columnist.
For amateurism
Some years ago I witnessed an Author Online™ having an embarrassing tantrum on Twitter. The situation was so cringeworthy, that I found myself clenching my teeth so tightly that I chipped the end of my right incisor.
The fit was motivated by a tax return. This Author Online™ had by then only published some things here and there, receiving the kind of symbolic (patronising) pay that some magazine editors imagine better to no pay at all.2 The accountant who was helping with the tax return suggested they didn’t bother declaring the pittance they had made writing that year, that they should treat writing as a hobby. This sent this Author Online™ into a Twitter rage — expressed through a thread, of course. What did the accountant mean that writing was a hobby? Didn’t the accountant understand that it’s almost impossible to make money writing fiction but that this doesn’t mean one isn’t trying? Didn’t the accountant know how serious this Author Online™ was about their career? This minor fit is to me symbolic of the delusional nature of thinking of writing as a profession, for the vast majority of us. A profession pays taxes. It doesn’t matter how much you’d want it to be a profession. If it isn’t bringing in the money, then it’s something else.
In December 2022, the advisory organisation (that likes to pose as a union) known as the Society of Authors published a report detailing the income of writers in the UK. The report found that the median income for writers in the UK was of £7,000 per annum (down from £12,330 in 2006). This median takes into account extremes like the Author Online™ above, and those who could be classes as bestsellers, although the report doesn’t distinguish between them, meaning that if we take into consideration the eye-watering earnings of a handful of lucky pens, the median for the riff-raff at the bottom is considerably lower than £7k a year. The hard truth is that for most of us putting words on a page won’t pay a living wage, no matter how serious we might be about it. To insist on seeing writing as a profession, in blatant denial of the reality of the metier, and how little money it makes the vast majority of us, is both delusional and symptomatic of the LinkedInfication of everyday life — that need to establish hierarchies between culture producers: the pros and the amateurs. This validation-seeking division is senseless, for what’s so wrong with amateurism? Some of the best books ever published were written by people who didn’t even consider themselves writers, or who wrote during the time left by a day job.3
The idea of professionalism is frequently mobilised under the illusion that it can contribute to levelling the playing field, opening the door to those from disadvantaged backgrounds. This might be true in sports, where amateurism has historically been used as a gatekeeping device, to keep working class people away from gentlemanly spaces. But unlike literature, sports can pay very well when you are a professional, even a mediocre one. When it comes to writing, it might make more sense to look for the money elsewhere while listening to your accountant’s advice: treat it as a hobby.
I promise you no one but you will care about it anyway. No matter how many tantrums you throw on Twitter, or X, or whatever it is called now.
Speaking of columnists and narcissism… Today (21.03.24) British opinion-excreter Owen Jones announced that he had left the Labour Party. Agreed that this Labour Party is appalling, that Keir Starmer is an uninspiring shill at best, but would Jones preferred it if the Tories got elected for five more years? Does he realise that this is a two-party Kingdom and that this is an election year? Is Labour, however bad it might be, the same as the Tories? In Argentina we call this position born out of ideological purity and stupidity “eslomismismo”, which could be translated as “itisallthesameness”. Or is this about Disaster Socialism? But more importantly, who gives one turd if Jones has left the party? Why did he deem it worthy of a column? And why do the title of opinion pieces always sound so incredibly solipsistic: “The Labour party is in my blood. Here’s why I’ve just cancelled my membership”. I like to believe it’s possible to write in the first person without breaking one’s neck trying to self-fellate.
The kind of thing remorseful editors often do to continue to peddle the fallacy that it’s possible to make a living writing fiction…
As I have written here to the point of nausea, I come from a literary culture in which hardly any writer lives off their fiction. Even our top guns had an additional income at some point of their lives (if not all of their lives): Borges, director of the National Library and university lecturer; Cortázar, translator at Unesco; García Márquez, director of the Mexican Film Institute and journalist; Lispector, journalist.
What you are pointing towards, without quite saying it is that writing is becoming like the other arts - which have a vast area of unpaid work and a different paid area of work. To try and be more precise it is becoming like music, drama and photography. Where the unpaid sectors are vast and whilst known and under-acknowledged are ignored by the authorial inclined critical and publishing sectors. In our celebrity based public sphere, the public speaks of the canon of celebrity writers living and dead - just as they speak of beyounce, swift, dune, neitzsche (supply your own examples) whilst ignoring the unpaid sectors. What I am suggesting is that writing and i suspect reading are becoming like this... determined by the technological changes we are living within. The economics of writing that your understandably concerned with reflect this change, i think.
I think what’s hardest in our times isn’t that one needs another job than writing /making art but that those jobs aren’t what they once were! Even if one was to take inflation into account.