That’s how I’d have capitalized this recent article by The Atlantic, which asked that rather big question. Describing Alex Jenni, a French biology teacher who recently won the Prix Goncourt, France’s top literary award, the article noted,

In the Alexis Jenni school of thought, a writer may be someone, anyone, with a compulsion to scrawl or the conviction of having something to say. A writer is not defined by his career, but the simple act of writing regularly. And authors who found success through the muck of making ends meet have taken that approach for some time now, in practice at least. [...]

T.S. Eliot, on the other hand, was inclined to keep his day job even after it was financially necessary. When the Bloomsbury group offered to set up a fund that would allow him sufficient funding to become a full-time writer, the poet turned them down. “This idea that Eliot should be freed from the drudgery of work misses the point that he was actually very interested in the minutiae of everyday life—he was a commentator on the quotidian,” British Library curator Rachel Foss told The Guardian.

For modern-day counterparts to Eliot, there’s Days of Yore, a website that interviews artists “about the years before they had money, fame, or roadmaps to success, and inspires you to find your own.” Here, Deborah Eisenberg discusses her “late start” to writing and Jennifer Egan describes how she went on an archaeological dig. But this isn’t just a nostalgic look-what-crazy-job-I-did-when-I-was-young-and-hungry site.  The site’s co-founder and editor, Astri von Arbin Ahlander, a self-described “aspiring artist” highlighted in the Atlantic piece, argues that the day job is a way of life for today’s writer:

Says Von Arbin Ahlander, “We’re kidding ourselves if we think we can make a living on writing.” As for the romantic ideal of the leisurely writer life, slowly crafting one’s masterpiece in the calm solitude of a big, empty house: “I mean, that’s over,” she added, “Unless you’re a trust fund baby.”

So if 99% of writers today need to have a “real job”—beyond pounding furiously at a typewriter all day—then what DOES make a writer a writer? One commenter put it bluntly: “I became a writer when people started to pay me for my writing. Before that, I was an aspiring writer.”  Another took the oppoite view: “I dislike the very concept of ‘being a writer’. That is something fakes and wannabes say at bad parties to impress the foolish. [...] I’m quite happy to say, if the subject ever comes up, ‘I write’, but never ‘I am a writer’.”

Here’s a better question: Why such angst about a self-imposed title, a person who writes versus a Writer?  It’s a question of proving your seriousness.  Most other professions have clearly defined borders: lawyers have law degrees and bar memberships; doctors have M.D.s and board certifications.  Realtors, health inspectors, schoolteachers like Alex Jenni–each needs certain objective qualifications and credentials.  You know they’re serious because they’ve spent time in school and training; you know they’re (ostensibly) qualified because they’ve been tested and granted licenses.  So you turn over your lawsuit, or your appendix, or your child, and let the experts work.

Writers operate outside these boundaries.  You don’t need an MFA–or even a high school diploma–to write.  You just pick up your pencil and go.  Anyone can call himself or herself a writer, and anyone can be a writer.  Democratic?  Yes.  But that also makes it hard to prove your seriousness, which is really the topic the Atlantic–and the commenters on the article–delicately circle around. Who’s just a dilettante, and who’s a capital-W writer? Is it a career or just a temporary occupation?  Something you happen to do, or something you are?

Recently a stonemason (yes) came to repair the foundation of my house.  He made up haiku while he was working, he told me, reciting one to me as he chiseled away the old mortar.  But he was quite firm: he was not a Writer.  He was a stonemason, the last in a long line of stonemasons, the “and son” of DeAngelis and Sons.  That was his art.  The haiku, he insisted, wasn’t writing, just something he did to keep his brain active.

So was he a writer?  Are you?  The answer may all lie in your attitude towards your art–or towards that “something you do” just to keep your brain active.

Further Reading:

• A related question: do you have to be a genius to create a work of genius?
• By the way, does “work” writing count as “real” writing?  In the Huffington Post, Holly Robinson says yes.

Everywhere you look, there are reasons not to write. If you believe in omens–as I do–you may start to wonder if the universe is trying to tell you something.

You may feel like you shouldn’t even start writing. Recently, the Huffington Post offered 10 reasons not to write your novel. And some of them are pretty damn good. For instance:

2. Someone has already written your novel, and better than you ever could. Certainly you’ve visited a bookstore, picked up a new release novel the plot summary of which filled you with loathing. “That’s the idea I had,” you mutter. See? What did I tell you?

5. Instead of writing a novel, why not focus on, say, sex? Imagine that you give your wife, husband or partner the same amount of attention that you lavish on this, this idea — these voicesthat you can’t get out of your head. Imagine what perfection you would attain in the sack! Think of how heroic and loved you would be!

6. Substitute parenthood for sex (above).

If you do manage to get yourself writing, you may constantly be wondering if you should stop. Novelist Tony D’Souza writes about scrapping his novel and starting (gulp!) from scratch.

On November 7, 2009, more than two years after writing the first lines, I crossed my fingers and sent the first 150 pages to Liz. I was a wreck. Maybe it really was a masterpiece, I kept trying to convince myself as I paced and chain-smoked cigarettes. After a few days of that, her email pinged in my inbox. She’d written, “Tony, a few of us have looked at this. I’m sorry, we don’t understand why you’re on this track…”

I showed the email to my wife, then did what I should have done some time before: I put Voyage of the Rosa down for a much deserved rest. No matter that we needed money urgently. No matter that I had slaved at it like doing lacquer-work for years. No matter that I loved it. No matter that I felt like jumping off a bridge. Voyage of the Rosa was not happening at that time, and somehow, I managed to admit it. The next evening, I wrote the opening 20 pages of my new novel Mule.

How do you keep going when faced with all these reasons to quite–or to not start at all?

The best answer I have found is this quote from Annie Dillard–which I have painted over my desk:

Every morning you climb several flights of stairs, enter your study, open the French doors, and slide your desk and chair out into the middle of the air. The desk and chair float thirty feet from the ground, between the crowns of maple trees. [...] Get to work. Your work is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your desk in midair.

Like many writers, I tend to think of job-related writing–like copywriting, or editing, or ghostwriting memos–as Not Really Writing. In the Huffington Post, though, Holly Robinson expresses a very different point of view:

“Doesn’t it bug you to write other people’s books when you could be working on your own?” another writer asked me recently.

Not a bit. In fact, I love telling other people’s stories. What other job would allow me to walk in another person’s shoes so completely that I’d feel their blisters? Working as a book doctor or ghost writer, I have the opportunity to immerse myself in worlds as disparate as the priesthood, cooking, fashion design, and Tejano music — I just finished ghost writing an incredibly moving memoir for Chris Perez, the husband of the fantastically talented Mexican-American singer, Selena. Ghost writing isn’t just a paying job for me. It’s a passion. Sharing stories is what makes us human.

And you know, Robinson’s right: there is a certain joy in untangling awkward sentences, polishing language, and making muddied ideas clear. But in my own experience, that type of writing doesn’t fulfill me in the same way creative writing does, but it uses the same word-processing part of my brain–thus leaving it too tired at the end of the day for working on stories.

What about you? Do you consider your day-job writing to be Real Writing? How does it affect your drive to tell your own stories in your fiction?

• Robin Becker explains how teaching book reviewing helps writing
• How a police blotter can improve your writing
• One writer’s story of why he quit his day job

Recently Chip Cheek, a writer and the administration coordinator at Grub Street in Boston, quit his job—even though he loved it. He explains why in an essay on Grub Street’s blog:

I have always had a full-time job, even while I was getting my MFA. It has seemed the prudent thing to do: keep a steady, reasonably well-paid job, so you can dedicate all your worrying to writing. It’s a good idea; Flaubert said something similar, although Flaubert didn’t have to worry about actually having a job. Also he took forever to write his books.

Over time, in this multitasking, productivity-obsessed day and age, as I have kept on writing and holding down full-time jobs, a couple of things have become clear to me. One is that spending a couple of hours here and there with my writing, wherever I can find them — even on the rare weeks when I can find them every day — is not even close to adequate. I need four or five hours, eight when I’m really cooking. (One of the best days of my writing life was when I wrote for seventeen hours straight.)

The second thing, which everyone knows, is that becoming a writer is not just a career but a whole way of living and thinking and communicating — a way of being — and at a certain point in your life, anything that competes with it or is incompatible with it is unacceptable.

I’ve quit my day job for writing not once but twice. Right after college, I started a job in textbook publishing in September, and by October, I was already plotting my escape for graduate school. I quit the desk job almost exactly a year to the day after I started and made my living as a freelance proofreader until I started school (and for a while thereafter). After grad school, I got a job as an “editor” at a startup that shall remain nameless—but unfortunately, most of my “editing” involved tinkering with PowerPoint slides. I quit after four months and spent the next three months writing the first draft of my novel—and it was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.

On the other hand,on the blog “Guide to Literary Agents,” guest blogger Alexis Grant offers some compelling reasons to keep a day job. Here’s the first:

1. A job helps you generate ideas. Having a day job gives you the opportunity to get out and about, talk with smart people and learn new things. You can do all of that without a day job, of course – but we often don’t make it a priority. The daily interactions I have through my job often lead to ideas for ebooks and blog posts and freelance pieces. Without that stimulation, I wouldn’t be the same writer.

Have you ever quit your day job to write? Could you ever see yourself doing it?

Whether you’re a literary wunderkind whose first book was a bestseller, or one of the thousands of writers who have to claw their way to a sustainable career, the writing life requires patience and resilience, a commitment to faithfully staying the course though the course sometimes offers little encouragement or reward. And yet we do it; we pass up other opportunities, neglect other pursuits, sacrifice free time, travel, relationships, prestige, in the name of something most people just don’t care much about. We come to a crossroads every day, and every day we take the same left turn. Is this the definition of insanity? No, it’s the Long Haul.

Stacey D'Erasmo - from The Rumpus

The first “Long Haul” column is by novelist and teacher Stacey D’Erasmo, who has this advice to offer:

It helps if you’re already outside the social norms for whatever reason and have some experience making a path where there isn’t one. John F. Kennedy, Jr., say, probably wouldn’t have been a very interesting writer. James Baldwin was a great one. We don’t teach this to our students—we can’t. What would we say? Be a freak, or at least have the courage of one? I mean, sometimes we do say that… but since we usually say it while standing in a university classroom—and the university is the patron of the arts of our time; we’d be toast without it—the context tends to belie the message: Be a freak, but meet with my institutionally validated approval.

Nevertheless, this is what I see. Over the long haul, whether you ever intended to or not, you find yourself building a system of values that supports your art as much as, if not more than, any of your grants, publishers, prizes, editors, or good reviews. And to see this is also to see that what I have created over the years is a sort of double life, split between two communities. [...]

Read the full essay here, and check back at The Rumpus for future columns by other writers.

image credit: Flickr - Rennett Stowe

During my should-be-writing years, I thought about my novel all the time. Increasingly, these were not happy or satisfying thoughts. My “novel” (which had started to wear its own air quotes in my head) became something closer to enemy than lover. A person and his creative work exist in a relationship very much like a marriage: When it’s good, it’s very good, and when it’s bad, it’s ugly. And when it’s been bad for a long, long time, you start to think about divorce.

Daniels’s essay has been making the rounds on the internets, and reactions have varied from “So true!” to “Quit yer whining!” Read the full post at Slate, and tell us: Do you sympathize with the plight of the 10-year novelist? Is this just par for the course? Or do 10-year novelists just need to learn to buckle down?

Now Mediabistro—an expert if ever there was one—offers a new series of how-to videos, answering just those questions. Their series “I Just Wrote A Book… What Do I Do Now?” gives an overview of the process, including “The Writing and Editing Process,” “Finding an Agent,” and “Social Networking, Promotion, and More.”

Viewing is free, but only for a limited time, so if you’re approaching the end of a book, check them out now.

Image Credit: daveandrunning.wordpress.com

Creating on demand, always being on, always being told we’re not good enough, we’re not successful enough, and we’re not doing enough. I’ve been working this gig for twelve years now and I can tell you this much: the pressure never ends.

I understand the siren song of all the hype that’s attached to things like social media and networking, but I think it’s also the reason Publishing loses so many great writers every year. The stress of trying to be-all and do-all as a professional writer inevitably and negatively affects the writer as well as the quality of their work, which tips over the seven dominoes of writer self-destruction via creative fatigue: exhaustion, paranoia, burn-out, depression, isolation, renunciation and, finally, tossing in the towel.

Read the rest of the post, including one tactic that might prevent literary burnout, here.

Mark -

I may be willing to do this, but I’d really like to know: who IS getting paid, if not the contributors? I contribute to a lot of anthologies, and almost without exception, they offer to pay contributors based on the advance, or a small percentage of the royalties. The idea is a great one, and the contributors are top-notch, so this book could make real money. Why wouldn’t the people who provided the material for the book get some of that money?

Not trying to give you a hard time. These feel like reasonable questions.

Thanks,

Steve

Now, as an emerging writer, I’m sometimes approached to participate in projects for free. And because I’m an emerging writer, often the trade-off in publicity is worth it for me. I’ve had agents contact me, and editors solicit work, as the result of such projects. But for Almond, whose career is more established, the calculus may be different. And more importantly, as he points out, if the anthology’s editors aren’t even willing to offer their contributors an honorarium or a tiny percentage of any future royalties—but are pocketing the full advance for the book themselves—something does feel amiss.

This whole exchange brings up a larger point, though. Are there projects that don’t pay, but which writers might want to contribute to for the “good karma” alone? Well, I think so: Fiction Writers Review, for starters. Unlike the anthology in Almond’s post, there are no advances involved here; FWR is a labor of love for us, and not one of our editors, nor our web designer, Marissa, makes any money from the site. In fact, we often buy books and send them to contributors at our own expense. We do it because we think fiction matters. We want to call attention to the great emerging fiction writers out there, and that goal is important enough to merit our time and effort.

Nevertheless, we hope to be able to pay our contributors in the future: we’re all writers here, and we believe your work is valuable. Until then, we offer our heartfelt gratitude to our reviewers, interviewers, interviewees, and essayists. This site wouldn’t exist without you, and we thank you for accepting good karma as payment—at least for now.

Photo from http://danishapiro.com/interviews/

In the L.A. Times, author Dani Shapiro reflects on the challenges of a writing career–the lost days of “writing in the cold” for years while building a reputation, the recent “blockbuster or bust” mentality, and how emerging writers can persevere in spite of all of this:

I recently had the honor of acting as guest editor for the anthology “Best New American Voices 2010,” the latest volume in a long-running annual series that contains some of the finest writing culled from students in graduate programs and conferences. Joshua Ferris, Nam Le, Julie Orringer and Maile Meloy are just a few of the writers published in previous editions, but now the series is coming to an end. Presumably, it wasn’t selling, and its publisher could no longer justify bringing it out. Important and serious and just plain good books, the kind that require years spent in the trough of false starts and discarded pages — these books need to be written far away from this culture of mega-hits, and yet that culture is so pervasive that one wonders how a young writer is meant to be strong enough to face it down. [...]

But in the last several years, I’ve watched friends and colleagues suddenly find themselves without publishers after having brought out many books. Writers now use words like “track” and “mid-list” and “brand” and “platform.” They tweet and blog and make Facebook friends in the time they used to spend writing. Authors who stumble can find themselves quickly in dire straits. How, under these conditions, can a writer take the risks required to create something original and resonant and true?

Read the full essay here.