[Insert self-sabotaging fears that guarantee no chance of gainful employment.]
That lead-in was written to be a click-baiting joke, but where honesty and careerism intersect is probably one of my more consistent obsessions. I took ideas of meritocracy to heart as a young man in college, and you better believe that heart was crushed savagely and repeatedly when I entered the workforce post-graduation in 2006 and realized there was little use in American society for a Hunter S. Thompson and Bill Hicks-worshipping, anti-capitalist philosopher with a yearning to confess his deepest insecurities in defiance of an alpha-male-controlled patriarchy for the sole purpose of subverting cultural norms to promote a more fair and just society that was sensitive to all walks of life. This was my idea of a boldly original brand for myself as a burgeoning writer—though at that time the concept of a “brand” never crossed my mind. I was just writing confessions of my sadness, fear, and alienation of being a clueless college graduate, and I didn’t do it with any sort of professional consistency, nor with the web savvy to create viral content (thank God). I just hoped that such “fearless honesty” would be rewarded and recognized for being what I thought was surely “inherently virtuous.” I can look at those early writings now from a middle management point of view and think “wreckless incompetence” is just as apt of a description, and let’s face it—the opinion of middle management might matter when we’re not selling books at the rate of Stephen King.
I started thinking about this subject again after finding Lynn Steger Strong’s February 27, 2020 piece for the Guardian entitled A dirty secret: you can only be a writer if you can afford it. She confesses that if it weren’t for other people’s money (i.e. fellowships, supportive parents, and a supportive husband) she might not have stayed afloat long enough to write her new novel, Want. The result of this privilege, she writes, was a “blindness with which I bounded towards this profession, the not knowing, because I had never felt, until I was a grownup, the very real and bone-deep fear of not knowing how you’ll live from month to month.”
She cites the Authors Guild’s 2018 Author Income Survey in which the largest survey of writing-related earnings by American authors ever conducted found, “incomes falling to prehistoric lows to a median of $6,080 in 2017, down 42 percent from 2009.” I’m dreading a 2021 survey that accounts for further shifts in data due to the Coronavirus Pandemic.
What all this leads up to is a not-so-obvious fact that the average writer can’t afford the time and space to execute their craft unless they have some other means of support, and like Strong, I agree that we need to work towards removing a harmful stigma and system that has come into place:
Those of us who are not bolstered by outside sources, those of us who are but still struggle, and say it out loud, often run the risk of seeming whiny or ungrateful; maybe we worry we will just be thought not good enough. To be a writer is a choice, after all, and I continue to make it. But perpetuating the delusion that the choice is not impossibly risky, precarity-inducing, only hurts the participants’ ability to reconsider the various shapes their lives might take in service of sustaining it and them.
It allows a system that cannot sustain most of the producers of its products to continue to pretend it can.
And thus I launch my new website fully knowing that the fruits of my labor to maintain it with regular updates will be relegated to “personal satisfaction” at best. Because I too need to work other jobs to support myself and my family, updates will be infrequent but honest. I feel zero need to nail myself to a cross and bleed out for the world to see like when I was younger, but I also can’t guarantee that I won’t shoot myself in the foot every so often. I will do my best to avoid commenting on issues without research, writing inflammatory accusations of any kind (but especially those without basis), and offering half-baked opinions in 120-or-less, devastatingly clever characters for the sake of “winning the Internet,” “owning the Libs,” “being more woke,” “canceling toxic culture,” or anything else similar in vein to what I view as a current culture war against complexity, nuance, and intellect.
If that’s the sort of reading you dig, or if you just enjoy incredibly long sentences that are still grammatically correct, I implore you to stick around.
Paul Losada 