Or: We Don’t Do It For The Money.

From The Guardian (scroll down for this juicy snippet):

Forbes magazine has revealed that JK Rowling is not only the world’s richest author, but the world’s highest-earning celebrity; her income last year was £150m. But before aspiring scribes boot up their computers en masse, inspired by dreams of wealth and fame, it is worth remembering that becoming rich through writing is only slightly more likely than achieving an Olympic medal in Quidditch. According to the Society of Authors, the average salary for a writer in the UK is £10,000 – which should give anyone thinking of entering the field pause for thought.

Thank god there are other rewards. Like the creative satisfaction. The intellectual work-out. The joy of sharing your art with others. Right? Right. Right!

I think I just moved through the three stages of writerly grief there: Disbelief, resignation, defiance. Finally, acceptance. Write.

I’m working, working, working today — on deadline for a couple of things, so for now I’ll just cross post to this great interview with Tom Kealey, author of The Creative Writing MFA Handbook and main man behind the MFA blog.

Kealey offers lots of great things in this interview, but one of my favorites is this quote, from Doris Lessing:

Advice to young writers? Always the same advice: learn to trust your own judgment, learn inner dependence, learn to trust that time will sort the good from the bad.

Which is kinda like learning to identify and trust your own inner instincts, something I posted about a few days ago.

Oh Salman.

It’s hard to know how to read this letter of yours. Is it carefully constructed to imitate the tone of a curmudgeonly and egocentric fool, which would make it a masterpiece of parody and indicate that you have a sly and self-deprecating sense of humor? Or are you — could you really be — such a petty kind of man, one who would take an attack on his signing rate to be an excuse to start a pissing contest on the letters page of a national UK paper with a bombastic and loud-mouthed writer like Malcolm Gluck? Which is it? I just can’t tell!

Here’s a link to the “controversy.”

And here’s the letter in its entirety, as sent to The Guardian newspaper:

It’s always a delight to return to London from an arduous two-month book tour of North America to find myself being accused of “illusions” – that is, lying – in your letters columns. The weirdest part of Malcolm Gluck’s unpleasant little missive (July 17) is that he begins by saying it’s impossible that I could have signed my name 1,000 times in an hour and ends up by revealing that he did it himself. Anyone who has ever attempted to sign a lot of books quickly knows, as Gluck says, that the key is to have the support of bookstore staff experienced in the construction of a smooth “assembly line”. He tells us he had the assistance of such staff when he did it, but refuses to believe that I could have.

So let me be clear: I did not initial the books, but signed my full name; I did have the support of experienced staff at Ingrams book distributors in Nashville (and at many other US bookstores), who will confirm that among the fastest present-day signers of books are President Jimmy Carter, the novelist Amy Tan, and myself. I understand that Mr Gluck may be miffed that his own accomplishment has been equalled or bettered. That does not entitle him to accuse another writer of untruthfulness, without a shred of evidence to support the accusation. And, if memory serves, I actually signed the 1,000 books in Nashville in 57 minutes as against his 1,001 in 59, so his record is toast.
Salman Rushdie
London

A commentator (OK, it was my wonderful sister, Anna) asked a very pertinent question in response to the last blog post: How do you know if your work really is a piece of shit?

Anne Enright says you must not to listen to that internal voice, but instead practice some “mood management.” You must “…wrestle [your emotions] down to something roughly the size of the page.” While I do think that this is solid advice, there are ways that you can, with some practice, learn to assess your own work.

These methods I’ll call developing your intuition, developing your powers of assessment, and building an external feedback loop. (more…)

The title of this post is a line from this forthright essay about the writing process by Anne Enright, taken from the Guardian books section. Read the whole essay to see the line in context, but here’s the opening paragraph as a teaser:

It doesn’t matter what you think about your work. This is one of the weirdest lessons a writer has to learn, that the emotions that push you to write better, with greater accuracy, truth, verve, wit; the despair that makes you cast your eyes to the ceiling and then plunge back to the keyboard; the running pleasure of one good word being followed by a better; the glee as you set a time bomb ticking in the text; the glorious megalomania with which you set out to describe and yes! conquer! the! world! … are all completely redundant once the piece is finished.

Enright won the Man Booker Prize in October 2007 for her fourth book The Gathering, which introduced her to a whole new audience. The Times book blog Paper Cuts posted something about her back then, and the tenor of the comments – most of them asinine in the extreme – is indicative of her reception. She got in a lot of trouble for her essay about the McCanns in the London Review of Books. UK media commentator Janet Street Porter – a woman who might be described as shrill if she wasn’t simultaneously so horsey – encouraged the public to boycott Enright’s books.

I find Enright’s essays (and check out her others in the LRB while you are over there – one on religion and her children, and one on breastfeeding) to be refreshingly honest and powerfully written. I think this is why she provokes so much ire: she writes about the things we think and feel but are afraid to express. Which, in my book, makes her a good writer. Which takes us back to: The thing you have written is a piece of shit. What writer hasn’t thought this, at one point or another, about their own work? Enright’s point is that you can’t let that voice dictate to you or you’d never write another word. I couldn’t agree more.