WRITERS & MONEY. (cover story)

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Author: Johnson, Sarah Anne

Lynn Freed: Everything I have written just or most for the money has been lousy. It just doesn't work for me. Students often believe that they'll be rich if only they hit. That's rarely the ease.

Bret Anthony Johnston: Our society forces everyone to view success through the lens of dollar signs; writers are no different. But it's a flawed premise. Many writers I know--and I've occasionally succumbed to it as well--think that a big book contract signifies a "'big" book, a great book. Or, when we resent hearing that someone got a six-figure advance for two books, we do the opposite; we think it means the book is just a commercial endeavor for the publisher, a book that lacks substance. The reality is that the commerce of publishing, the money side of things, is often as arbitrary as the critical side.

Jason Shinder: People correlate money with mediocrity, with a kind of bourgeois [attitude] that will somehow undermine a writer's engagement with his work. If you're comfortable, you cannot have the kind of visions that you need. That comes from the stories that we hear, that are true, that have been replayed so much, like Blake's. It's as if the price of admission for greatness and genius is poverty.

But in truth, that's a myth. Faulkner worked hard to make money. He wrote a lot of his stories for money. There's a belief that not having money creates a hunger, and that's true. So the question becomes, how do you keep that hunger going when you have money? John Irving does it. People do it. Money changes things, but it doesn't change the need to make art. There are writers who are born with money. They have to deal with the perceptions that what they're feeling is mitigated by money, or that their art is not earned. They have to fight that. Everyone has conditions they have to work with.

Bob Shacochis: Money is for writers what it is for everybody else--freedom to pursue what you want--and writers are bulldoggish on a single pursuit: writing. Over the years, I've noticed three myths at play that are extremely detrimental to that pursuit.

The first is the royal point of view: Writers don't require money because suffering--in this case, insolvency--is a virtue that energizes the creative spirit. Nonsense.

The second myth is the ivory-tower delusion that urges writers to pretend that somehow money will inevitably dilute his or her juice and corrupt their art or, at the very least, make them lazy.

The third myth is the rags-to-riches fantasy that almost all writers indulge in: the belief that the more money a publisher throws their way for a book, the more likely it is that the book will be a success, rather than a bottomless sea of red ink that has the potential to prevent a writer from ever being offered a book contract again. It behooves a writer, agent and editor to agree on a financially realistic contract that has some possibility of zeroing out on the balance sheet.

Amy Bloom: There are a lot of serious fiction writers who can support themselves in journalism or publishing, but those jobs tend to be extremely demanding. People might think of other things they like to do besides teach and work in publishing. It's a big world out there. If you're a very good nurse, for example, you could work three days a week and make enough money to write. Cleaning houses, teaching nursery school and programming computers--you don't have to make your living in the writing business.

Freed: There's no conflict concerning money unless one is in the happy position of being asked to write a book one doesn't want to write for a million dollars. Generally, you write and hope to sell what you have written. If you make enough to live on this way, you're fortunate. If not, you have to work in order to live. It's that simple. Of course, without having to earn a living, there would be more time to write. But that does not necessarily mean that the writing improves. As for teaching, this depends entirely on the writer herself. For me, working in a bank would have the disadvantage of 50 weeks a year of rage and boredom.

Johnston: I try to stay out of the commercial side of the business. I have a truly terrific agent, Nina Collins, and she's a genius at negotiating where art and commerce meet. I'm not. My job, and I think the job of all writers, is to log the long hours necessary to create the best piece of art that I can to entertain and move readers. The temptation, when we think too much about the business side of publishing, is to try and write for the current trends, just to make a buck. This is poison, in my opinion. You have to trust that if you dedicate yourself to the craft, if you commit yourself to your projects, then you'll get published, you'll put food on the table, a roof over your head. Write what you want, not what the market wants. If you're a creative writer, write for the ages, not the trends.

Many writers move into teaching but, as often as not, this move isn't entirely inspired by finance. There are easier ways to make money, and to make more money. Teaching offers a reliable and respectable paycheck, but it also offers a weekly opportunity to surround yourself with smart writers and wonderful books. There's safety there, both for your art and your mortgage, and that's attractive. I would teach even if I didn't need to. And most writers I know feel the same way. I had this conversation with Richard Bausch a short while back, and he said he loves teaching so much he'd never stop. I teach two days a week, and I give those days completely to my classes and my students; I don't write on those days. Most other days, I put in full days at the writing desk.

Elizabeth McCracken: One's writing and one's writing careers are two separate things. Too many young writers, I think, take on awful teaching jobs because the job seems like "'a writer's job," but then it doesn't leave enough time to actually write fiction, or isn't spiritually invigorating enough for good fiction (or poetry or nonfiction or playwriting). Better to tile bathroom floors and have time to think, or wait tables and eavesdrop, than to take a teaching job that doesn't allow you the time and inspiration your work needs.

Shinder: There are people who look up from their desk and they're 40, and they realize they've been living a very low-budget life to produce art. Maybe they had to do that. I knew early on that I didn't want to depend on residency or grants. I didn't want that to be one of my conditions. Everyone has to make money. It's like a taboo to talk about money. Wallace Stevens said that money is a kind of poetry. We're angry that it makes us do things that we don't want us to do, but it's part of the conditions of life.

Freed: I chose to do what I wanted--write, travel--and had, therefore, to find employment that would support that. In my case, this was teaching.

Johnston: When I was writing Corpus Christi: Stories, I--like many writers--found alternative economies to support myself. My priority was on the art, on writing fine stories, but I also had to keep the lights on, feed the dogs, buy books. I freelanced, worked in a bookstore, wrote travel articles. I wrote book reviews, I interviewed an adult film start I worked in a comic-book store, I did manuscript consultations. The trick is to do whatever you can to support your art without compromising it. Not only does this take the pressure off getting a giant book deal, or being. sorely disappointed if you don't, it keeps you thinking about what's important. Scott Turow wrote Presumed Innocent early in the morning, riding the commuter train to his law offices.

McCracken: I recently considered applying for a full-time teaching job to take advantage of health insurance and a regular salary, but in the end I decided not to apply. I realized I'd rather be broke and writing than flush and not. So I didn't apply, and my husband and I (he's a novelist, too) moved to Paris, where we're living an old-fashioned hand-to-mouth and entirely delightful existence. It might get old, of course, but for now I think it's much better for my writing, and that's what's important.

Shinder: There isn't anything dramatic in my life where I could say I pursued money at the cost of writing. But writing is always at the cost of life in that writing is always something that you're trying to give yourself over to. The choices I've made about how I live are part of the person I am, and my fear about writing and my passion for writing are all enmeshed in it. There are people like Donald Hall who left teaching to go to his farm to have time and space to write. I think about that now and then, but I've created a life in which I do give myself that time and space.

Shacochis: The Catch 22 for me as a writer has always been money. To make money, I must write books. To write books, I need the luxury of uninterrupted time. To secure uninterrupted time, the bills must be paid. To pay the bills, somewhere there must be a source of cash flow, immediate and reliable. To turn on the cash flow, I've had to teach and, lucky me, [write for magazines]. The problem is the teaching and the freelancing pay the bills but leave in their wake a poverty of free time to write my books. And sooner or later, the magazine work is not psychologically cost-efficient--it's frequently humiliating, and magazines are just a form of slow newspaper, here today and gone tomorrow. No one throws away a book.

Johnston: The balance for me is to try to forget about what's happening at the lunches between agents and editors in New York City and to focus exclusively on writing, on creating interesting and entertaining characters and stories. Most of the writers I've met are smart enough and dedicated enough to succeed in any profession in the world--professions that would guarantee a far more stable, far more luxurious lifestyle. But that's not what's important to us. We don't want mansions or yachts: We want readers. And readers, no matter what society tells us, are priceless.

As for advice, write the absolute best book you possibly can. Don't rush it, don't get bogged down in envy when other writers pull down huge advances. Focus on your characters and their stories, on how best to tell them. This will take years and years and years. Once you have a great book, find a great agent. The rest is an act of faith, an act of courage.

Rector: Balance is an illusion best gotten rid of at the very get-go. There is seldom balance. There are, rather, obsessions, priorities, temperaments and choices. One has to live with the good- and bad-weather consequences of the roads taken and the roads not taken. Balance sounds good, balance sounds like the answer to everything, but balance is actually a hoax, at best a futile hope, and really the answer to nothing. Perhaps one looks back in retrospect and says, "This day or that hour or that week was balanced," but as a hope or a means of transport, balance is, I think, meaningless. If you want or require balance, become a yogi.

Shinder: Don't wait for things. Offer things. Think about what you can offer that's different and try to create an organizational life around it. Make a choice about how you want to spend your time and create space for your creative work. Don't fall into the trap of envying the situation of other writers. Create your own environment within the conditions you have to work with. You can't be angry at the reality of having to make money. It's a condition of life. You have to figure out what to do with it. The vehicle through which you make money has to be your art. If you go into being a teacher, go into it as a writer. If you go into being a dancer, go into it as a writer. You have to go into things with the presence of the writer in you.

AMY BLOOM was nominated for the National Book Award for her first book of short stories, Come to Me. She is the author of the novel Love Invents Us. Her most recent collection of short stories, A Blind Men Con See How Much I Love You, was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her nonfiction has appeared in Tin House, The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly and The New York times Magazine.

LYNN FREED is the author of a memoir, Reading, Writing Leaving Home: Life on the Page, and several novels, including House of Women, The Mirror, The Bungalow, Home Ground and Friend of the Family. Her essays and articles have appeared in Harper's, Tin House and Three-penny Review.

BRET ANTHONY JOHNSTON is the author of the award-winning Corpus Christi: Stories. His work has been featured in the Paris Review and Tin House and the anthologies New Stories From the South and The O'Henry Prize Stories.

ELIZABETH McCRACKEN wrote Niagara Falls All Over Again, The Giant's House and Here's Your Hat, What's Your Hurry? Granta named her one of the best 20 writers under 40.

LIAM RECTOR, director of the Bennington Writing Seminars MFA program, is the author of American Prodigal: Poems and The Sorrow of Architecture, as well as the editor of The Day I Was Older: A Collection of Photos, Essays, Reviews on the Work of Donald Hall.

JASON SHINDER is the founder and director of the YMCA of the USA Arts and Humanities Program and author of Among Women, Every Room We Ever Slept In and Get Your First Book Published.

BOB SHACOCHIS is the author of Easy in the Islands, Swimming in the Volcano, The Next New World, The Immaculate Invasion and Domesticity. He has received the National Book Award for First Fiction and the Prix de Rome in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was a finalist for The New Yorker Book Award for best nonfiction. He is a contributing editor at Harper's and Outside magazines.

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Amy Bloom

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Lynn Freed

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Bret Anthony Johnston

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Elizabeth McCracken

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Liam Rector

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Jason Shinder

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Bob Shacochis

PHOTO (COLOR)

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By Sarah Anne Johnson

Sarah Anne Johnson is the author of Conversations with American Women Writers and The Art of the Author Interview. Web: www.sarahannejohnson.com.