Dear Scribbler, #1
Dear Scribbler, #1
How can I keep writing for no pay while I work full-time to support my family?
How do I create time and space (and ongoing motivation!) to write for *no pay or promise of publication* when I also have to work full-time to support my family? How do I keep having fun without external recognition or reward?
Sometimes friends or [my spouse] will still ask me essentially what I want to be when I grow up, and I still say: writer. But I have enjoyed writing less in recent years, where I feel I give it *so much.* I sometimes feel it keeps taking but doesn’t always give back. It’s not a reinforcing feedback loop. I have to take care of myself. I want to know my efforts will “pay off,” whatever that means. It is hard to keep going when there is no clear destination!! Alas, it is hard. I choose whether to do the hard work, or not. I also still buy mega millions tix, just in case.
When I started this column I could hear this question rumbling down the track from fifty miles away. It’s the obvious question—in some ways the only question. And as with all real questions, there is no perfect answer. We live in this fucked-up quagmire of late-stage capitalism, in a country without government-subsidized daycare, universal healthcare, a guaranteed living wage, or significant arts funding. Even under ideal conditions, it’s tough to make money writing. It’s a wonder anyone who’s not independently wealthy is writing at all.*
So first off: Know that you are amazing. You are incredible. You are doing something almost nobody does. You have been doing it for years! You have done it while your kids were small and you have done it when you were exhausted from your job and you have done it with almost no external validation and reward. Good job, you. I am in awe.
But honestly? Here’s what I sense from your letter: You don’t give a shit about that. You are sick of being superwoman, you are sick of being a martyr, you are sick of being a long-suffering, hard-working, virtuous, persistent, stick-to-your-guns, get-up-early, stay-up-late, butt-in-chair, amazingincredibleaweinspiring woman (TM). You don’t want to be amazing. You just want to be a writer; you’ve always wanted to be a writer. And fuck the inspirational writing blogs, and fuck the advice columns, and fuck the self-help books: you may be writing, but you aren’t the paid, published writer you mean when you say, “I want to be a writer.” You’re not a writer in any kind of way that feels good right now.
So here’s my first piece of advice: Stop writing.
Image: Triptych from the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas.
Not forever! Just for now. Take a break for a day, a week, a month, a year. If it doesn’t feel good, and it’s not giving anything back, and it’s depleting rather than sustaining you—stop.
You have enough things tugging at your sleeve.
Writing will not die, suffer, or disappear if you walk away. It is not a baby; it is not a needy lover or spouse; it is not a house or a potted plant or a garden or a muscle or a war or a metaphor of any kind. It’s just a thing you do, that you’re good at, and that you love, except when you don’t. You will not lose it until you lose the physical capacity to form words into patterns, at which point you will likely have more pressing problems.
So start by laying it down for a minute, mentally, and letting go of the fear that it won’t be there when you come back. It will.
Now let’s break your question down into its component parts. You start by asking about creating time and space—this is where most people start, and that’s where they get stuck, for good reason (cf. “fucked-up quagmire of late-stage capitalism”).
The way I see it, you’ve got a limited number of hours in the day. Sleep is non-negotiable. (DO. NOT. SHORT. YOUR. SLEEP.) So, your options for getting more time include any or all of the following:
Quit or reduce your paid work. For most people, this is not an option that will work, and for some it’s not even desirable—we know this!!—but it’s always worth remembering that it is an option. Be a fiction writer for a second and ask yourself “what if.” What if you took a sabbatical? What if you went half-time for a while? What if you looked for a more flexible job? What if you had to rely on one income? Again, I understand this is a nonstarter for a lot of people and I am absolutely NOT trying to convince anyone to quit their job. I just want you to think about it for a hot second before deciding it’s impossible. Thought about it? Done some back-of-napkin calculations? Okay, assuming you’ve really thought about it, move on.
Stop doing some things. I have a messy house. I have lumpy hair. My yard is ugly. My closet is overstuffed. My kid eats a lot of corndogs for lunch and goes to aftercare and plays way more video games than I used to think was ideal. This is at least in part because I am graspingly, ferociously, ruthlessly selfish about my creative time, which includes not just writing time, but all the stuff I do to maintain mental balance and flow—exercise, chill time, naps (yeah, fucking naps!), reading books, watching movies. I leave a lot of things undone in order to get the things I need to write. When people come over, I get embarrassed about the mildewy shower curtains or the grubby cabinet doors or the fact that I still haven’t spackled over the chipped paint in the living room after living here ten years. But as part of this life, I have accepted that in some arenas I’m going to fail to impress people—even disappoint them. Even, occasionally, my partner. Which brings me to the next option:
Ask someone else to do more things. I didn’t necessarily start out wanting to do this, but *I am duty-bound to mention here that everyone who has ever asked me this question has been a cis woman married to a cis dude.* There is self-selection bias at work here—not only do I know more women writers intimately than I do men, but men tend to seek advice less often than women. (In my experience, they are less shy about asking for agent referrals and information.) However! Current statistics show that working mothers still do more housework and childcare than the men with whom they share households and children, even when they earn more money. For every straight woman who is gathering breath to say “not my man!” (yeah, yeah, not mine either)—I urge you to think about how hundreds of years of societal expectations that women do literally everything in these arenas has affected your (and his, and my) perceptions of what counts as “more,” “less,” and “equal” in your household. I’m not saying your menfolk suck! And it’s possible they are enlightened unto incandescence, or, in the case of my husband, just naturally cleaner. All I’m saying is, when I find myself self-flagellating about messiness or selfishness, I try to stop and reflect on how much time a similarly messy or selfish man would spend self-flagellating about it. Perhaps my failure is only the failure to be a good woman, not a good person. And perhaps—it’s hard to say this, but necessary—perhaps, after centuries of women sacrificing their art to dying in childbirth and taking care of sensitive man-baby lovers and husbands who maybe made some great art but actually did fucking suck as people—THINK OF ALL THAT ART LOST, REALLY THINK—some minor reparations are due in terms of women’s labor. Maybe I just get to be too messy??? Maybe you just get to demand more childcare than is strictly equal? I don’t know. Far be it from me. What’s on us, though, is this: For cis women artists married to cis dudes, the willingness to commit to ongoing negotiations with our spouses for time and energy and space and financial resources is an absolute must. You and your dude have both been socialized to think that the default is that you will do more (and, just as importantly, care more) about housework and childcare and all the emotional labor that keeps the capitalist family unit/machine running smoothly. Maybe your spouse really is maxed out on every inch of time and space in his life. But, as with #1, please take a minute and ask yourself if there are really, truly, honestly no more family resources that could be allocated toward you.
Leverage every other resource in your life that you’re not thinking of. Parents. Friends. Siblings. The teenager down the street. Anyone who can and will help out with a drop-off playdate, or a space out back or upstate for you to write in, or a writing retreat they can cut you a deal on, is on the table. I don’t want to presume, but there’s a good chance that you have not asked for everything you could ask for; many women do not in their souls and guts really believe that asking for stuff is just fine and also how you get things. (If I’m wrong, I’m wrong!) Being able to accept a yes or no and not feel like an utter shit for asking is a skill worth cultivating. Think of it this way: Maybe the askee is on their own journey to learn to say “no,” and you’re giving them the precious chance to practice.
I’ll refer you to some detailed advice Captain Awkward wrote on this subject a few years ago, during the height of the pandemic childcare crisis. She’s been doing this a lot longer than I have, and she has nuts-and-bolts stuff that may help more than mine, so please take a look. But ultimately, as we know, time and space are finite. So that’s why there’s a “woo” part coming next.
Image: Primavera, Sandro Botticelli, late 1470s or early 1480s. I love that no one seems to know what it means, when you can just look at it and pretty much see exactly what it means.
Why woo? Because I can’t help but notice that while your letter starts with time and space, it very quickly shifts to words like motivation, fun, and enjoy[ment]. Time and space couldn’t be realer. But I think maybe the heart of your question is: “How do I keep having fun without external recognition or reward?”
So: How to keep having fun without external validation? “Alas, it is hard,” you say. Yet we all enjoy doing some things that are hard. Chess, cello, cake decorating, crosswords, Pilates, swimming, sewing, beating video games, planning trip itineraries, brewing hard cider: these are all difficult things that some people enjoy, usually without recognition or reward outside of what they produce and how they feel while producing it. Activities like this can lose their luster when they become a job, but that’s not your problem right now. Your problem is that writing—the hard thing you enjoy—has lost its luster because it’s not your job, and therefore you are not getting paid or recognized for it.
The first thing to internalize is that even if you get published, paid, and praised, you will never get external validation in time for it to help your writing.
Because of the built-in delay between writing and whatever money and praise it might garner, those kinds of external validation, however grandiose, will never be enough. If you get them, you get them for something you labored to finish a long time ago, when you weren’t getting any recognition or reward. This never changes. For many writers, success actually ratchets up stress and decreases satisfaction in their work. (Ask me how I know!) However radiant these authors may appear in public while they’re accepting awards and diving into their piles of gold coins, they are almost certainly having the same problems with writing they had before, plus several new ones. Acclaim happens in public, but writing happens in private. (Bestselling author Jessie Burton wrote a fantastically vulnerable post about this several years ago on her blog. She’s since taken it down, but here’s an interview about it.)
Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad I got my external validation. Like getting my PhD, it was good for my career and good for my ego—at the time. It made me feel like a "writer” in the exact sense you mean—for a while. But all published, paid writers know that the feeling doesn’t last, because there’s always someone out there, probably a lot of someones, doing better than you. All my author friends feel this way; we talk about it all the time. It’s not just us—even the most astronomically successful and highly praised authors feel this way. I interviewed Jennifer Egan right after she won the Pulitzer for Goon Squad. She didn’t seem to feel all that great about it. She was busy; I caught her squeezing in some laundry before the kids got home from school. It took her nearly ten years to write her next book (which didn’t get rave reviews). I miss my far more limited version of success a lot, and I enjoy what privileges it still brings. Was it great for my work, though? Not really! And while it made it possible for me to go full-time writing (again: for a time!), it didn’t make the next book any easier to write.
I don’t mean this to turn into a lecture on how you shouldn’t want to get paid or published. The problems that come with it are problems we all should have! And I’m not trying to tell you not to seek those things. Seek them, do! But I am 100% confident they will not increase your joy in writing. And joy in writing—fun—is something you asked about specifically.
There’s only one kind of external validation that has ever helped motivate me in a lasting way, by increasing pleasure and community: my writing group. I cannot recommend highly enough getting together with a group or even a single writing partner to trade work—not primarily for critique, but for mutual feedback and support. Of course, this is one more thing that requires time and space, one more unpaid evening away from the kids per week. But it’s the closest you can get to external validation while you write, in my experience, and well worth pursuing.
And finally, to circle back to the beginning: the only way to make sure something is always fun is to stop when it isn’t. When you were a kid, writing was play. You stayed up too late doing it, blew off homework, got made fun of for doing it at recess. Being bad at it didn’t stop you. Getting ignored or shamed did not stop you. You stopped when it stopped being fun.
I can hear you thinking, “but if I’d stopped [playing cello] when it got hard, I’d never have become good enough to make it to the [symphony]!” I leave it to the professional cellists of the world to assure me that it was all worth it. All I can say is, while you can and should get as good at writing as you can, in the end, there’s no applause for being perfect—no guarantee that being perfect will even get you an audience. Meanwhile, it is possible to push too hard and wound your capacity for taking pleasure in your work, or indeed anything, and that takes time to undo, and time, as we know, is precious. (I wrote here about how I do it, but if anhedonia is a recurring problem for you, please please see a mental health professional. It’s a warning sign for all kinds of things.)
Unpopular opinion: “Showing up to the page” and waiting for inspiration is like sitting down to wait for a bus when you have no idea when, or even whether, it’s going to come. You could be sitting there a long, long time. At the very least, bring a book. Okay, now pretend you have an app on your phone that gives you a heads-up when a bus is on its way—better, right? You can at least hang out in the coffee shop near the bus stop until you get the alert. Now pretend the bus driver can find you wherever you are. You do not have to be actively thinking about the bus at all to make it come. Sometimes it even seems to come faster when you don’t think about it—or maybe it just seems that way because you’re having fun. But one thing’s for sure: it definitely makes taking the bus more appealing. And when something is appealing, you are far more likely to go back to it again and again.
(Guys, I just invented Uber! I’m rich!)
After a certain level of competency has been reached, the question of whether someone will eventually publish or pay you is largely a combination of luck and privilege. You roll the dice over and over until your number comes up. The more privilege you have, the more dice rolls you can afford in a shorter amount of time. If you want to keep playing the odds in this game, you will need to last. The imperative of finding joy in writing is never more pressing than when you don’t have the money, the space, the time, the mental energy, and the connections that others do.
Are you writing exactly what you want to, or are you trying to figure out what other people want, what will sell, what people say you’re good at, what will get called “real writing,” or what will make your parents proud? Are you trying to earn your right to write by being miserable? Can you let go of that completely for a while and only do the kind of writing you wanted to do when you were a little kid—or none at all, for as long as it takes to miss it and come back? Are you brave enough to walk away and learn object permanence and make your art self-sustaining no matter what happens with it down the road?
Good luck. I am rooting for you.
*I’m thinking of starting yet another recurring feature on this Substack called “How I Make It Work,” inviting writers to give a rundown of their finances (anonymously or not), both now and early in their career. Here’s my “How I Make It Work”: when I got started I had no kid, and my spouse with a straight job floated us for a few years while I pieced together a very low income freelancing, teaching, waitressing, and doing shift work as an online review fraud investigator. We deferred my student loans as long as we could. The novel I wrote during that time, Good as Gone, gave me my first livable income (ever, in my life), but we always knew it would run out, and even with careful planning by my husband who’s an amazing budgeter, it eventually did. Income-wise, I/we kind of went back to square one, now with a kid and a mortgage—but due to that first round of paydays, we had a huge leg up this time around. Privilege accumulates. Recently I started teaching again, which I can do partly because of prior successes. It brings a modest but real income and doesn’t seem to drain my writing the way other jobs do—when I’m not overwhelmed, I’m inspired. So that’s my story without numbers, though I have a feeling numbers are going to be crucial to this project down the road. I am seeing now that calling something like this “How I Make it Work” is part of the problem, and “How It Worked for Me” is too passive to be honest. There is always going to be a “we” involved, whether it’s a partner or some other person or people or, best of all, a community, who are helping. No one anyone does this alone, and that’s what I want us to start realizing. So anyway, if you’re a writer making it work, and you want to write anonymously about it, contact me at dearscribbler@gmail.com.