Negotiating with the Dead - Part Four

Dear Margaret Atwood,

Today we're talking about money and the God of Art, so I've brought you to a jewelry store.  It's supposed to represent both since someone has to design the pieces while someone else has to sell them.  Jewelry also has a 200% markup and that's something we can never enjoy as authors, so we're drooling a little bit.

The Great God Pen

I loved this chapter.  I have loved all the chapters.  So, the question is whether or not we write for money or for the art of it.  

I started writing novels at thirteen and I knew that writing was going to play a major role in my life because I was good at precious little else.  It did feel like the God of Art chose me and sometimes I've felt like that was quite cruel of him.  The thing that they never tell you is that there is no satisfying conclusion to your art.  There's no end.  If you've finished writing your novel, there's a bug in your ear whispering that you should start another.  If you failed, you have to try again.  If you won, you have to win again.  Go. Go. Go.  Forever.  

At a tender age, I knew that I was not going to be able to write for a job in my adulthood.  My cousin was a journalist and a photographer.  Sometimes, she took her younger sister and me out on assignments.  It wasn't terrible as far as work goes, but neither was it the high I experienced when I wrote a novel.  That was a good time, even if I ended up with a bad novel.

I also knew I wasn't going to be able to make any money as a novelist.  The only person I had ever met who had written a book and had it published was another cousin of mine who published one YA book and I couldn't see how the royalties from that could pay the water bill.  After all, there was only one copy in the school library and everyone read that one copy.

Yet, I was bit by this hellish bug.  

I already knew all about what poverty was like.  I had an accountant in my brain pushing numbers into a calculator and shaking her head.  "You can't be a novelist," she'd say, "the numbers don't add up."

She was quite right.  Most people don't know how the $20 they spend for a book is divided, how little the author gets, and how quickly that tiny stash of money is swallowed by expenses that don't feed the author or pay their rent.  They are expenses that exist just to give the author the opportunity to keep on writing.

My inner accountant screams a lot.  Yet, I've already done so much to placate her.  

When I left home, I did not go to university.  University had a different price tag attached to it for me than it would have had for you, Margaret.  The university education would have put a burden of writer's debt around my neck that I might never have been able to pay off.  Instead of that, I went to college and then got jobs working in offices in universities.  So, I worked and wrote at the same time.  

I have to say that is not an ideal situation for a novelist.  Maybe it would work for someone who wrote something smaller, but a novel requires great hunks of open brain to formulate.  Typing all day at work only to return home to type some more left crinks in my fingers and shards of steel in my back.  

My inner accountant was happy during this time because instead of using my spare cash to pay off a student loan, I was putting money aside for when my writing was better.  By this point, I had begun publishing my books online and it was quite clear from reader feedback that I had a long way to go.

I did not marry money, but I had my eyes out for the right sort of man to marry.  I was very much aware that marrying the wrong person could ruin my artist life and thus, make me wish I was dead.  So, the man I was going to marry needed to be the sort of man who was understanding toward writing, thought that books were worthwhile creations, and enjoyed books himself.  If I was really lucky, he would also be the sort of man who could make enough money that he wouldn't share the same views as my inner accountant about how my art needed to be profitable.

I became a good enough writer to be published by the time I was 25.  However, getting published was a completely different matter than I had been led to believe and the situation has only gotten worse since then.  I was a good enough writer, but I was also throwing up into an empty ice cream bucket and breastfeeding, so I didn't get a book published with a publishing company until I was 29.  

It was then that I made a startling discovery.  I knew much more about publishing than I thought I did.  In the years that I worked and squirreled money away, I had learned heaps about graphic design, publishing, PR, and advertising.  The publishing contract I'd been able to land was with an honest publishing company, so there was that, but they weren't going to be able to give me a launch as fancy as one I could give myself.  Not only that, but I knew authors who wrote well, landed contracts with publishing companies (after dozens of attempts), and still lost money.  

I didn't lose money, but I fell out of love with the idea of getting a publishing company.  It didn't make sense to send my books off to publishing companies where they would sit waiting for someone to decide whether or not my book could make money for them.  My books were intended to be casual reading, but they were not pornographic or titillating, and that felt like the only type of thing that made money.  

I put the whole thing on pause.

For a season of my life, I was quite busy, caring for others, caring for myself, and holding back floods. I only wrote one book in six years.  That was unprecedented for me.  I had written 19 novels in 17 years.  When the storm stopped, I was quietly cleaning up the water and wondering what I ought to do with the rest of my life.

I didn't want to go back to writing novels, even though the money was lined up better than it had ever been before.  By this point, I knew there was no happy ending to being a writer.  I'm an inventive person and I had a crafting business, so I thought maybe I'd do that.  I decided, most seriously, that when I crossed the threshold out of my bathroom, I'd stop being a writer.  I'd put all that away and focus on crafting.  But the God of Art stopped me before I could take that final step.  He stood behind me and told me that I had to continue writing.  I had been chosen to write.

I cried.

The unseen God of Art explained things and pointed me in the right direction.  What was most notable about the experience in retrospect was that the elusive God never once said that I'd make money.  I've been working as an independent author for several years now and I still haven't spent all the coin I set aside when I was a young warthog taking money from a university instead of giving them any. 

My inner accountant is still unhappy.  I made more money last year from my writing than I ever did before, but she's squawking, angry I lost that sweet contract.  She doesn't want me to whore myself off.  I'll tell you what she really wants.  She wants my balance sheet to show that I didn't spend money, but I made money.  She wants me to pull money out of thin air.  Not even successful publishing campaigns do that.  No one does that, but it's what she wants.

I need her to shut up.  It has never occurred to me that my inner accountant should be silenced, but I see now that would probably offer me greater peace and strength than anything else.  

You don't mention an inner accountant in your chapter.  You say that you need to write to the market if you want to make money, but you don't talk much about what compromises you made, or if you didn't have to make any at all.  Instead, you dedicate the majority of the chapter discussing how terrible it is to serve the God of Art, who doesn't care if you're fed.  I'd like to say that the inner accountant doesn't care if you're satisfied with your art, as long as the numbers look right.  Now, I'd like to say something rude about both the inner accountant and the God of Art since they both seem heartless, but I can't afford to offend the God of Art.  I still have to finish my trilogy.

Thank you, Margaret.  I feel refreshed.  Can I offer you one of the free pamphlets advertising diamonds that they have on the counter of the jewelry store?  They're free!

With a sparkle in my eye that I hope is as charming as a diamond,

Stephanie Van Orman 

Novelist