How on earth did you end up doing archaeology? Of all the weirdly specific, vocational jobs, you manage archaeology 😂 Anyway, I enjoyed this and look forward to more in the future if you carry on.
My first degree was in classics, and my income from my first novel meant I was able to spend some time doing a low-paid job. I was paid, though (about USD10K a year, so not much), and accommodation was usually free or very cheap.
I don't think I've ever known a writer, whether personally or not, who had anything like a conventional or normal path to success. The one common element seems to be the willingness to work hard. Writing is extremely difficult work, after all. Writers who make it tend to be writers who write, and publish, a lot - the ones who spend a decade working on their special novel without ever finishing it tend to go nowhere.
Related to this, the day job - or better yet, a series of them - isn't just economic fallback. It provides human experience, essential to good writing.
One thing I really appreciated here was your discussion of your readiness to deposit half a novel's worth of prose in the circular filing cabinet. Assuming 2000 words a day, five days a week, that's a month's work, if you're an extremely fast writer. Having the willingness to critically assess all of that work, find it wanting, and discard it, is crucial - a writer must also be their own most critical editor, which means regarding their own work with a certain ruthless detachment from the emotional investment they'll inevitably have with it (to say nothing of the inherent reluctance to go back to square one after putting in so much time walking down the wrong path).
I'm not a fast writer, which is why my columnist commitments have been, with only one exception, monthlies. I was offered a weekly about a year-and-a-half ago (considered an absolutely plum job in British journalism) and turned it down.
The editor who offered it to me basically had a cow down the phoneline in response.
I was able to do that because I once had a lucrative dayjob...
That it was more like a year's work just drives that point home all the more strongly, I think.
Did you find that you were able to recycle some of that work - plot points, settings, characters, etc. - into later work? I've generally found that when I think I've 'wasted' time going down a blind alley (not only in writing), I later discover that in fact I picked up sometime useful along the way, which comes in handy for things I hadn't anticipated in the context of the original project.
Your writing reads like we're sat by a fire in Scotland, in a pub full of firebrands, with a decent drink and half-played chess game in front of us. You're holding court and not in a boring way. You have a great way of telling your story without being narcissistic. Have you considered being Meghan Markle's latest PR? :-D
Feb 19, 2023·edited Feb 19, 2023Liked by Helen Dale
You're right of course about the day job thing. Part of the problem is the "fake it til you make it" culture, that many writers' carefully curated online presentation hides the 9-5 cubicle job/well-paid spouse/inheritance/uber driving/whatever that actually allows them to write. So from the outside, it looks like they make a tidy income just from writing.
I regularly encounter people who think that by writing the occasional piece in major papers that I must be making a fortune.
Feb 19, 2023·edited Feb 19, 2023Liked by Helen Dale
A piece by Ginnia Bellafante summed it up, how seeing the generation above made it seem like a real expectation to get an upper middle class lifestyle out of writing and the humanities, up until the 90s.
"In the early 1990s, when Elizabeth went from Harvard to The New Yorker to the outsize success of her first memoir, “Prozac Nation,’’ it was still reasonable to believe that the right combination of talent, drive and intellectual privilege would sustain a long, materially comfortable New York life in the arts, in publishing, in the academy. This was not merely youthful delusion; there were validating examples everywhere.
Book parties, then the center of literary social life, dependably provided them. Invariably, they were thrown at the large apartments of marginally older writers, editors, agents, humanities professors — people who managed to parlay an early interest in Willa Cather or the Franco-Prussian War into a bohemian affluence that seemed to operate at a level of cruise control. "
When I won the Miles Franklin, I was hosted for a book party at an enormously swanky Sydney restaurant that no longer exists (Bayside Brasserie, for people whose memories go back that far).
When I won the Australian/Vogel, I was taken to supper at Doyle's (which does still exist).
Heraclitus said: “Out of every one-hundred men, ten shouldn’t even be there, eighty are just targets, nine are the real fighters, and we are lucky to have them, for they make the battle. Ah, but the one, one is a warrior and he will bring the others back.”
We all think that we are that warrior.
As we get older, we realize that only occasionally do most of rise to the level of fighter.
Mostly, we pass our lives as targets.
Happiness consists of trying our best, living good (moral) lives, and enjoying what we have.
The bitterness comes from not accepting that we aren't the warrior, that we aren't lucky (in this endeavor), or that we didn't work hard enough.
I think the biggest thing is the opacity of the publishing world. Sure I could self publish with a few clicks of the mouse, but the real publishing......it's like a black hole in my research.
Hello Helen, I enjoyed your interview on MindMatters. The question I start with is; Why write? There are billions of books of all kinds in the world. Why would a person choose to read a particular one that is not assigned in a university class? Most current writers seem to write for fame and money, and some find a formula for writing that captures enough interest/conflict to be profitable. This is not a moral judgment.
The next question I ask is why has Helen been successful? The first thing is your sincerity and the next is your forthrightness. These are values of Helen. They are not an image or PR stunt of Helen. You write from your heart and mind together. What attracts readers to you is the same.
Actually I would sleep with somebody for a million quid as long as they had had a good shower or a bath. No big deal. I would draw the line at gay sex though. Yes, writing is bloody hard work and I admire anybody that manages to get there in print. My experience, across many encounters, is that it is about who you know. My stepfather got a deal because a friend of his brother was at Eton with a literary agent. The idea that somebody somewhere is going to pick up an MS from the tired pile of elegantly bound Garamond and go, "Fark me, this is the next Harry Potter" is like winning the lottery without actually buying a ticket. A musician once told me that getting your stuff heard is like pinning a post-it note to a tree in a very big forest. The chances are near zero. I do what I tell everybody: wait. You may be dead, but one day a supercomputer will curate the best of the best and if you are the best, it will find you.
How on earth did you end up doing archaeology? Of all the weirdly specific, vocational jobs, you manage archaeology 😂 Anyway, I enjoyed this and look forward to more in the future if you carry on.
My first degree was in classics, and my income from my first novel meant I was able to spend some time doing a low-paid job. I was paid, though (about USD10K a year, so not much), and accommodation was usually free or very cheap.
I don't think I've ever known a writer, whether personally or not, who had anything like a conventional or normal path to success. The one common element seems to be the willingness to work hard. Writing is extremely difficult work, after all. Writers who make it tend to be writers who write, and publish, a lot - the ones who spend a decade working on their special novel without ever finishing it tend to go nowhere.
Related to this, the day job - or better yet, a series of them - isn't just economic fallback. It provides human experience, essential to good writing.
One thing I really appreciated here was your discussion of your readiness to deposit half a novel's worth of prose in the circular filing cabinet. Assuming 2000 words a day, five days a week, that's a month's work, if you're an extremely fast writer. Having the willingness to critically assess all of that work, find it wanting, and discard it, is crucial - a writer must also be their own most critical editor, which means regarding their own work with a certain ruthless detachment from the emotional investment they'll inevitably have with it (to say nothing of the inherent reluctance to go back to square one after putting in so much time walking down the wrong path).
It was actually about a year's work.
I'm not a fast writer, which is why my columnist commitments have been, with only one exception, monthlies. I was offered a weekly about a year-and-a-half ago (considered an absolutely plum job in British journalism) and turned it down.
The editor who offered it to me basically had a cow down the phoneline in response.
I was able to do that because I once had a lucrative dayjob...
That it was more like a year's work just drives that point home all the more strongly, I think.
Did you find that you were able to recycle some of that work - plot points, settings, characters, etc. - into later work? I've generally found that when I think I've 'wasted' time going down a blind alley (not only in writing), I later discover that in fact I picked up sometime useful along the way, which comes in handy for things I hadn't anticipated in the context of the original project.
I was able to recycle the research, as I explain here: https://www.libertarianism.org/publications/essays/authors-note-kingdom-wicked
Your writing reads like we're sat by a fire in Scotland, in a pub full of firebrands, with a decent drink and half-played chess game in front of us. You're holding court and not in a boring way. You have a great way of telling your story without being narcissistic. Have you considered being Meghan Markle's latest PR? :-D
SNORT.
That would involve going into politics. Bleurgh.
Titter.
You're right of course about the day job thing. Part of the problem is the "fake it til you make it" culture, that many writers' carefully curated online presentation hides the 9-5 cubicle job/well-paid spouse/inheritance/uber driving/whatever that actually allows them to write. So from the outside, it looks like they make a tidy income just from writing.
I regularly encounter people who think that by writing the occasional piece in major papers that I must be making a fortune.
Ah, those were the days. As Freddie deBoer says, "they stopped making that job".
A piece by Ginnia Bellafante summed it up, how seeing the generation above made it seem like a real expectation to get an upper middle class lifestyle out of writing and the humanities, up until the 90s.
"In the early 1990s, when Elizabeth went from Harvard to The New Yorker to the outsize success of her first memoir, “Prozac Nation,’’ it was still reasonable to believe that the right combination of talent, drive and intellectual privilege would sustain a long, materially comfortable New York life in the arts, in publishing, in the academy. This was not merely youthful delusion; there were validating examples everywhere.
Book parties, then the center of literary social life, dependably provided them. Invariably, they were thrown at the large apartments of marginally older writers, editors, agents, humanities professors — people who managed to parlay an early interest in Willa Cather or the Franco-Prussian War into a bohemian affluence that seemed to operate at a level of cruise control. "
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/10/nyregion/elizabeth-wurtzel-gen-x.html
When I won the Miles Franklin, I was hosted for a book party at an enormously swanky Sydney restaurant that no longer exists (Bayside Brasserie, for people whose memories go back that far).
When I won the Australian/Vogel, I was taken to supper at Doyle's (which does still exist).
DeBoer is absolutely right about the bitterness.
But life is full of disappointments.
Heraclitus said: “Out of every one-hundred men, ten shouldn’t even be there, eighty are just targets, nine are the real fighters, and we are lucky to have them, for they make the battle. Ah, but the one, one is a warrior and he will bring the others back.”
We all think that we are that warrior.
As we get older, we realize that only occasionally do most of rise to the level of fighter.
Mostly, we pass our lives as targets.
Happiness consists of trying our best, living good (moral) lives, and enjoying what we have.
The bitterness comes from not accepting that we aren't the warrior, that we aren't lucky (in this endeavor), or that we didn't work hard enough.
That is quite profound.
I agree and hope that you, Steve Fleischer, have a reasonable day job so you can keep writing.
wagmi
(I'm still not getting a job though)
Bonne chance :)
Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing
Sound advice.
I think the biggest thing is the opacity of the publishing world. Sure I could self publish with a few clicks of the mouse, but the real publishing......it's like a black hole in my research.
I will write about this issue in a future instalment.
Hello Helen, I enjoyed your interview on MindMatters. The question I start with is; Why write? There are billions of books of all kinds in the world. Why would a person choose to read a particular one that is not assigned in a university class? Most current writers seem to write for fame and money, and some find a formula for writing that captures enough interest/conflict to be profitable. This is not a moral judgment.
The next question I ask is why has Helen been successful? The first thing is your sincerity and the next is your forthrightness. These are values of Helen. They are not an image or PR stunt of Helen. You write from your heart and mind together. What attracts readers to you is the same.
Another good observation I'd like to riff on in a later piece in this series.
Actually I would sleep with somebody for a million quid as long as they had had a good shower or a bath. No big deal. I would draw the line at gay sex though. Yes, writing is bloody hard work and I admire anybody that manages to get there in print. My experience, across many encounters, is that it is about who you know. My stepfather got a deal because a friend of his brother was at Eton with a literary agent. The idea that somebody somewhere is going to pick up an MS from the tired pile of elegantly bound Garamond and go, "Fark me, this is the next Harry Potter" is like winning the lottery without actually buying a ticket. A musician once told me that getting your stuff heard is like pinning a post-it note to a tree in a very big forest. The chances are near zero. I do what I tell everybody: wait. You may be dead, but one day a supercomputer will curate the best of the best and if you are the best, it will find you.