CAN YOU BECOME A FULL-TIME FICTION WRITER?
April 1990
My friend Susan Weinberg is an immensely talented young writer. For several years now she has been publishing short fiction in small literary magazines. Until very recently her writing was a part-time pursuit; she supported herself doing editorial work for a magazine, with her own writing relegated to nights and weekends.
This past fall, however, she moved to Palo Alto, California, where she will spend the next two years writing full-time. She’s able to do this because she was awarded a Wallace Stegner fellowship, a prestigious grant that provides four writers a year with a modest annual stipend and participation in a twice-a-week writers’ workshop.
In November I was in the San Francisco Bay area for several days in the course of a lengthy promotional tour for Out on the Cutting Edge, my latest Matthew Scudder novel. I was able to spend some time with Susan, and over dinner one night I asked her what she wanted from her writing.
She thought for a moment and said that she hoped she could eventually secure a decent teaching job at a good college, one that furnishes her with a satisfactory and secure income as well as time to write.
I asked if teaching was important to her in and of itself.
Well, no, she said, it wasn’t. She wasn’t particularly drawn to it, but it seemed preferable to other jobs.
Wouldn’t she prefer to write full-time, and to support herself with her writing?
That would be ideal, she admitted. But she didn’t think it was a realistic aspiration. So far she had been paid only small fees for her stories. And, she pointed out, hardly any of the writers she knows are able to write full-time.
I’m sure that’s true. But it’s equally true that the great majority of the writers I know are able to write full-time, and most of them have been doing just that for years.
James Michener has said that a writer can make a fortune in America—but can’t make a living. I’ve quoted that remark more than a few times in this space because it seems to me to sum up the enormous gulf between success and failure in writing in America (and indeed in all the arts, and the sports world, and increasingly throughout our society). One either signs a ten-million-dollar contract—“inks an eight-figure deal” in journalese—or one bags groceries at the Safeway and hammers out fiction in the small hours of the morning. You make it big—too big, some might argue—or you just don’t make it at ail.
There is much truth in this. And yet there are many writers who have consistently made a living without ever making a fortune. Writing is what we do, and we are good enough and diligent enough and, yes, successful enough to be able to make a living without doing anything else. Sometimes it is not much of a living. We have, typically, good years and bad years, and some of the bad years are bad enough to make us wonder at the wisdom of our course. But most of us stay with it, and most of us somehow get through the hard times.
Sometimes, curiously, it’s harder to survive the good years. One writer I know sold a book to Hollywood every year for three years running. It did not take him long to revise his standard of living accordingly. In the succeeding half dozen years, when nothing he wrote was purchased for filming, he had the more difficult and less enviable task of reducing his lifestyle to fit his circumstances. Since then he’s had more good years, but he’s learned how to handle them.
“Of course I’d prefer to write full-time,” Susan said. “Isn’t that what everyone wants?”
Well, no, actually. Leaving aside the curious fact that some people don’t want to write at all, not even a laundry list or a ransom note, the fact remains that many of our number are happier if they don’t have to make it their sole occupation. Many people honestly love to teach—or practice law, or deliver babies, or install floor tile. They may find, too, that a good deal of their creative energy derives from their work, and that it gives them something to write about.
The life of the freelance writer, with its legendary freedom from routine, is hugely attractive to most people; indeed, there is no end of people out there who love everything about the writing life but for the horrible prospect of actually sitting down and writing something. For others, though, the solitude and the absence of routine are positively hellish.
I know one fellow who managed to be self-supporting as a writer but couldn’t bear the life that went with it. He hated being in his apartment all the time so he rented an office. He couldn’t stand being alone in his office so he rented desk space in a larger office so he’d have people around. Then, because he really yearned to be part of real office routine, he went out and got a job. He’s been bitching about the corporate life ever since, and talks endlessly about how he wants to go back to freelancing, but I don’t believe a word of it, because he’s elected to stay employed ever since.
Finally, not a few people keep their jobs out of a need for financial security. There are no pension plans for freelancers, and no fringe benefits, and no paycheck that comes whether or not the creative juices are flowing. On the contrary, there is the virtual certainty that there will be dry spells and hard times. Steady assignments and multiple-book contracts provide an illusion of security, but they won’t always keep the wolf from the door. (On the other hand, when you’re your own boss, nobody can fire you. That seems to me to provide a sort of baseline security, but there are times when it’s cold comfort.)
Let’s assume, though, that you can live with insecurity. And that you don’t have any inner need to work and play with others, and that there’s no other occupation with a claim on your soul. You honestly want the life of a full-time freelance writer.
Can you have it? Is the goal a realistic one?
You’re a step closer, certainly, if you’ve allowed yourself to entertain it as a goal in the first place. What I found unsettling about my friend Susan’s response was not that she had rejected the idea of writing full-time but that she had not really allowed herself to consider it. If you assume that writing will have to be a sometime thing, a sideline occupation, the assumption will almost invariably turn out to be the truth. It will steer you into a job that you think you have to have, and it will very likely affect what you write, and how you attempt to market your work.
Hardly any of Susan’s writer friends write full-time. When I was starting out, almost all of the writers I knew were either writing full-time or doing a little bartending or furniture-moving to make ends meet while they established themselves as full-time freelancers. And hardly anyone I knew intended to teach or write ad copy or have anything resembling a legitimate career while writing on the side.
I’m sure this helped. If you want to support yourself with your writing, I would think it would be worth your while to get to know people who are doing just that. Not just for the shoptalk and the companionship, both of which are invaluable, but because these people will serve you as role models. They will show you by their example that what you want is attainable.
They’ll also very likely show you how it is attained. People who write for a living are a little different from other people. They’re also different from one another, so generalizations are by no means hard and fast, but there’s at least one that seems to hold true most of the time:
They get a lot of work done.
This may mean working every day or it may mean working in frenzied spurts. It may involve the discipline of a 9-to-5 workday or it may consist of shuttling back and forth between the television set and the typewriter. You find out what works for you—that’s part of the life’s appeal, and different things work for different people.
Anyway, nobody pays you for the hours you put in, but for the work you produce, and successful full-time writers produce a lot. Some of us enjoy the process while others may liken it to torture—undergoing it, not inflicting it. But we all seem to get a lot of it done.
Earlier in this promotional tour I was in St. Louis, where I stayed with John and Barb Lutz. John and I got to talking about short stories. I had recently had the luxury of spending a month writing short stories. John’s an excellent short story writer—he won an Edgar for “Ride the Lightning”—and we agreed that we weren’t writing as many in recent years as we’d like to.
One year, John said, he had decided to make a special effort to get a lot of short stories written. By the time the year was over, he’d turned out 40 of them.
When I expressed astonishment, he assured me that wasn’t so many, that it was in fact less than one a week. “They weren’t all great stories,” he said, “and they didn’t all sell right away. But just about all of them sold sooner or later, and they keep bringing in little checks for foreign sales and anthology use. I ought to write more of them.”
Forty short stories sounds like extraordinary productivity for a year, especially when you consider that John Lutz was writing other things as well. Yet it’s a walk in the park compared to what some writers have turned out. The late John Creasey wrote 2,500 words before breakfast every day of his life. (Well, not when he was a little kid. You know what I mean.) And another writer I know, who nowadays relaxes and produces a single book a year, had a period of several years during which he turned out two books a month for one paperback house, one book a month for another publisher, and about 50,000 words of magazine fiction a month. And he did all this without working nights or weekends.
I certainly wouldn’t want to imply that the more a writer produces the better he is; that’s as much of a fallacy as its opposite. But those of us for whom writing works as a full-time pursuit generally do a lot of it. We may write one draft or several. We may find it easy or hard going. But we get it done.