Following up on “Calm And Happy,” Reader V writes:
“I wonder at one point if you could write about being a professional writer, demystifying the profession.
A lot of people with whom I used to be in writing schools quit their jobs to attend MFA (or other) programs in hopes of becoming full-time writers.
I can’t tell you how many mornings I’ve found it so darn hard to roll out of bed for work. And it’s always alluring to think, “Ah, people say I write well. If only I could become a professional writer, then BANG passion would forge together with livelihood and I’d be able to live forever off of my calling and find a sense of meaning.
But I wonder what the professional writing pasture really looks like.
Is it greener or just a different shade of ... brown?”
Matthew’s response:
Dear Reader V,
Thanks for writing.
First, I think I should state upfront that opinions vary on this subject. Every writer has a unique experience. I can only tell you how I see it after living out almost twenty years of full-time fiction writing.
I don’t think writers write to find ‘a sense of meaning,’ I think we find meaning and then share it with the world via writing.
The writing process definitely helps us shape the meaning. It can reveal what was previously hidden. But I don’t think it creates meaning anymore than a miner’s pickax creates diamonds.
When I was a young person, I was a teacher. I loved teaching. But my heart wanted to write. I thought that writing would make me happy. I hoped it would make my depression and anxiety go away, even though most of my favorite writers had mental health problems that no amount of success seemed to solve. In fact, literary success often seemed to make things worse for most of the writers whose portraits used to hang on my classroom walls.
Now that I’ve reached middle age, I'm not sure that our passions are supposed to make us happy. I think we have passions so that we can contribute.
Pretty much everyone told me not to become a writer. But something inside of me needed to write. Maybe it's just what I had to contribute.
A lot of the stories that came out of me and landed on the page were born from lived experiences. I wrote about teenagers because I had been one and taught and coached hundreds. I wrote about mental health and alcohol and outsiders, because I felt like an outsider, had mental health problems, and used to drink a lot. I wrote about family and football and religion, because when I was growing up, Sunday was for church and the Philadelphia Eagles. And I wrote most recently about a man in Jungian analysis, because—at the time—I was one. (Still am.)
‘Write what you know’ may sound trite, but I think it’s sound advice.
Write your meaning.
Maybe that’s a better way to put it.
My novels aren’t about mental health, alcoholism, the Philadelphia area, and family so much as they offer the meaning I have made out of experiencing all of the above.
I think for most writers, the meaning we extract from our lives is all we have.
But that doesn’t necessarily mean others will want our meaning—let alone pay money for it.
I used to think that talent always eventually rose to the top if the talented person worked hard enough. I’m no longer sure that’s true in the writing game. I’ve read too many excellent books that received zero attention. A lot comes down to timing. The zeitgeist. What’s popular at the moment of publication. Writers can’t predict trends, mostly because publishing fads come and go quicker than it takes to write and publish a novel. You have to just dive into what you feel passionate about and then hope the theme or subject is in vogue when it’s time to put your novel into the world. You’ll also need the gatekeepers—agents, editors, reviewers, directors, actors, etc.—to take an interest at the right time. You can network and lean on professional contacts, but no one can fully control all of the above. Well, most of us regular folks can’t.
The writing life has sometimes been very good to me. I have been extremely lucky. Yes, I've taken risks and worked hard for decades. But the stars aligned too.
And yet, there are still mornings when it’s tough for me to get out of bed. All my writing heroes were in the same boat. I've often wondered if being more prone to depression is exactly what makes some of us writers.
Three years of Jungian analysis has done much more to improve my mental health than writing ever has or will.
I did my Creative Writing MFA degree at Goddard College. I finished that almost seventeen years ago, so I imagine the program is much different today. It was a good experience for me. It was low residency, which means you only are on campus for maybe twenty days a year and do the rest of the work at home via the Internet. The two-year MFA experience was a safe place for me to make many mistakes while I practiced ‘being a writer.’ I also made a handful of wonderful friends.
I know several working professional writers who have MFA degrees, but most of the people I know with MFAs are not making a living from their fiction writing. Plenty of working full-time writers don’t have MFA degrees. So earning an MFA isn’t a guarantee or a requirement.
At the beginning of my MFA experience, I was told everyone would graduate with a publishable manuscript. I naively thought ‘publishable’ meant my creative thesis would have a shot at getting published by a major house in NYC. But I didn’t publish my creative thesis and I only know of a few writers who did. I think Goddard meant that every graduate would leave the MFA program with a finished creative project that some generous soul somewhere might theoretically ‘publish.’ But the language feels tricky in retrospect.
Most of the published novelists I know wrestle—spiritually, emotionally, psychologically—with the profession. Most don't find the writing life easy. You can spend years working on something that never even gets published. Or if you actually beat the odds and find a publisher, the critics might hate it. Most novels get no attention. Fads come and go, usually before most writers even notice. If money comes at all, it often arrives in lumps, meaning—even if you are reasonably successful—there could be months and years when you do not receive a paycheck. For many talented writers, the paychecks that do come in are not enough to live on. If you don't sell, the publishers drop you. Even though writing requires our full attention, many writers have to take on a second job or are, at times, financially dependent on a life partner or family member.
If you get a hundred-thousand-dollar advance for your first book—which would be amazing, right?—your agent will have already earned 15% of that by selling your debut, so that takes you down to eighty-five thousand. The advance will most likely be paid out in chunks over three years. Contracts are usually front loaded, but—for simplicity’s sake—let’s say you’re at twenty-eight thousand a year. But it probably took you at least a year to write the book, if not more. So really, you’re getting paid over four years. So eighty-five-thousand divided by four is just a little over twenty-one-thousand a year. And that’s before taxes. If it’s supplementary income, what a bonus, right? But if it’s your full-time job, it’s hard to live off twenty-one grand a year these days.
What about royalties? Well, you have to sell enough books to earn back your advance. You get a small amount of money for each book sold, which goes to paying back that 100K the publisher fronted you. (The good news is you don’t have to give any of the 100K back, even if your sales are terrible.) If you do earn out, it might be years later. And the first royalty paycheck will come maybe six months after you square up with the publisher. Again, you only get a few dollars credit from each book sold, so earning back 100K isn’t easy. You’ll have to beat the odds again. Many books never ever earn out before going out of print. Sometimes publishers don’t even print enough copies to make earning out possible.
Now, there are opportunities for foreign deals and movie rights, which could bring in more money. But not everyone gets those. And you’ve already beaten tremendous odds by landing the hundred-thousand-dollar domestic-deal advance.
If writing is your full-time gig, you will have to immediately sell another novel, which you better have written while you were promoting your debut. If that first book didn’t sell well—and many debuts don’t—selling the second will be much harder. Your advance will be smaller. Maybe even half or less.
Sometimes the advance for a novel is only thirty thousand. For some it might be ten or even five grand. Sometimes books can take many years to write. And publishing one takes additional years.
For the majority of writers, the writing life is not what most people fantasize about. It’s far less sexy. It’s mostly sitting alone in a room for decades mining your imagination and having the audacity to hope that someone somewhere will pay you for it. It takes a lot of courage. And even when that wonderful editor shows up to publish your novel, the writing life can still be strange.
Sometimes the writing life is driving four hours to do an unpaid book event where two people listen to your forty-minute talk, ask lots of intense questions, and then walk out without buying a single copy of your novel. Then you have to drive the four hours home trying not to think about the gas money you burned and the wear and tear on your car.
Sometimes it’s excitedly telling everyone you know about an upcoming New York Times review of your latest, and then being informed by your publicist a few days before the review posts that a well-known critic has publicly skewered and roasted your latest in a way that will be highly embarrassing. Do you tell all your friends and family members not to read it? Do you hide? Or do you quietly allow all of your internal organs to burn with indignity? Maybe all three?
Sometimes the writing life is having a novel rejected by every publisher in town, even though your last one was shortlisted for a prestigious award.
Sometimes it’s sitting stumped at the computer for years wondering if you will write anything salable ever again.
If a writer gets incredibly lucky, every once in a blue moon, the writing life looks like this:
See that look on my face? It seems to be saying, How the heck did this happen?
I’ve been trying to figure it out for a decade now and I still don’t really know.
While listening to The One You Feed Podcast, I once heard writer Dani Shapiro talk about envy. She questions whether anyone would really want to swap lives with a successful author if they knew all the pain and grief that accompanied that same life. She makes the point that it’s easy to sit back and cherry pick accolades to be envious of, but much harder to see the full picture and appreciate the messy entirety of another’s life. She suggests it’s counterproductive to compare yourself to only one aspect of a person’s biography. And she asks the theoretical envious person if they want all of a successful person’s life or just the good parts. You can listen to that interview here: What Brings Healing, Strength, and Connection with Dani Shapiro.
Most days I sit at a computer for eight hours, failing to write anything salable, and worrying I never will again. But experience suggests that—if I sit there long enough, sometimes for years—the magic will happen once more. Eventually, I’ll write another novel. Alicia will read it. If she loves it—after some more editing—the manuscript will go to my literary agent, Doug. If he thinks he can sell it, he’ll send it to the editor who published my last book. If the editor loves it, it’ll be published and my film agent, Rich, will show it around Hollywood, as Doug shops it around the world, looking for foreign deals. There will be chances, but no guarantees.
The dream of my last attempted novel ended at Alicia, who encouraged me—with ample and logical reasons—to shelf it. It didn’t go to Doug. There were no deals. Zero paychecks. That’s the way it goes sometimes. Even after twenty years in the game.
All that said, I still love the writing life.
I like being my own boss. I love spending most days alone with my characters. There’s a part of me that loves surfing the uncertainty, even though that ride has—on many, many nights—woken me up at four in the morning with a heavy dose of dread. I enjoy being here on Substack with all of you. I like contributing.
And some dedicated and hardworking writers do get lucky every so often.
But the capricious make-your-living-as-a-full-time-creative life isn’t for everyone. It’s just not.
I’ve heard people say that comparison is the death of joy. The internet says Mark Twain said it. True? The internet also says Teddy Roosevelt said, ‘Comparison is the thief of joy.’ Regardless of who said what, I agree. (Fellow author, Mark Cecil, also said, “Comparison is the thief of joy,” in last week’s interview, although I had written today’s post months before I received his answers.)
If you want to write, you should write. Not because the grass looks greener anywhere, but because your soul tells you to write.
If you are meant to write, you will write, regardless of what anyone says. Your soul will compel you. You will contribute. You’ll find a way. You’ll see what happens.
If you aren’t meant to write, you’ll probably find something else far more personally satisfying to do. And that will be just fine.
Do you have a question you’d like me to answer here? If so, please find my email address on the CONTACT PAGE of my website. Feel free to email me your question in a brief paragraph or less.
I can’t answer every question submitted, but I’ll do my best to eventually answer many.
That's some real talk! Crazy to think about how publishers sometimes don't print enough books to make an earn out possible. Yikes.
Your courage and drive are a mark to aim for.
Thank you, Matthew. This is so informative and reassuring. I appreciate your honesty. My soul wants to write. And that is it.
I’ve fantasized about quitting my day job and going for an MFA, writing all day and riding off into the sunset living happily ever after. Hah! But the bills need to be paid, so I won’t be doing that anytime soon. Instead I have been writing whenever I can, and also finding ways to incorporate creativity into my day job to pay the bills AND feed my soul. So far it’s been difficult, but there is a glimmer of hope and it’s starting to take shape.
I am determined.
This piece has helped to strengthen my resolve.