Occupation: Writer

You’ve decided what you are now that you are grown up…you are a writer.  But what are you going to do about it?  There are all kinds of writers in the world.  There are people who write letters, people who write email, dedicated bloggers, gamers who type to each other; there are people who write grants, people who write technical manuals, people who write non-fiction for readers great and small; there are writers who become poets, writers who become novelists; writers who become authors, and even writers who become editors.  There are writers who write for newspapers; there are ghost writers, writers for scandal sheets and gossip columns, even those who write graffiti unsolicited on city walls.

But what kind of writer are you?  And more to the point, can you make writing pay the bills?  That is the big bottom line for for most writers, especially the ones that would like to move from being writers over to that coveted title, “author”.

Paying the bills involves writing what Robert Heinlein dubbed “pay copy”, words in a row that someone somewhere likes well enough to pay out cash for the privilege of publishing them; and then, many someones who are willing to pay out cash for the privilege of reading them.

That has never been easy, and in recent years writing for brick and mortar publishers has become a very difficult field to break into.  Suzette Hadin Elgin remarked at a conference I attended in the 1980’s that she wrote her Coyote Jones science fiction novels because she wanted to go to grad school and didn’t want to take the money “out of my children’s mouths”.  She went on to add that thanks to the custom of shredding remaindered books instead of warehousing them that counting on making large sums of money from writing novels had become virtually impossible.

C.J. Cherryh had been a writer for some time before she officially broke through to “author” status.  Or perhaps I should say she had been an author for sometime before she lived on her writing income exclusively.  This lovely eventuality came about when she was working on a novel, and was rather behind on her deadline.  She explained to her publisher that she would be able to finish the manuscript sooner if she didn’t have to grade papers.  The result was an advance substantial enough to allow her to write full time.

Image by Ivan Walsh via Flickr

The advent of the Internet has changed the face of many things; not the least of which has been writing.  Web pages, blogging, articles, social networking: the variety of new media, the volume of content is staggering.  Information, misinformation, advertisements, fraud, pyramid schemes through which the user must thread a wary way to honest material.

Clearly, writers are a part of this modern wonder.  The challenge is before us:  Can we thread our way through the fraud, the under-payments, the hyperbole to reach solid resources?  Can we sell enough “pay copy” to support ourselves while we work toward that big break-through that will leave to fame and fortune?

Image by Ivan Walsh via Flickr