I came across this list on the Forbes site. ‘Ten happiest jobs, as reported a General Social Survey by the National Organization for Research at the University of Chicago.’ What interested me about this list is number 4:
‘4. Authors: For most authors, the pay is ridiculously low or non-existent, but the autonomy of writing down the contents of your own mind apparently leads to happiness.’
And coming in at number 7:
7. Artists: Sculptors and painters report high job satisfaction, despite the great difficulty in making a living from it.
I would have expected musicians to be in there with the artists. Basically anything creative gives you that sense of satisfaction. My favourite would have to be number 10:
10. Operating engineers: Playing with giant toys like bulldozers, front-end loaders, backhoes, scrapers, motor graders, shovels, derricks, large pumps, and air compressors can be fun. With more jobs for operating engineers than qualified applicants, operating engineers report being happy. (I bolded that sentence because I think it tells us a lot about human nature).
(If you are curious, here are the 10 most hated jobs (by the people who do them).).
All of which brings us back to how do we make a living at the thing we love. Well, most of us work another job. I teach in a creative area, so I’m really lucky. I get between 2 and three days a week at home to write (in the weeks I’m not marking, then it is full time). And even then, I resent the time that doing the shopping and driving kids to and from the train station takes out of my writing days.
Part of this post sprang from my disappointment today. I’d applied for an Australian Literature Board Grant to write a book. I don’t know if you have Lit Board Grants in the US. Here in Australia there’s a grant pie and heaps of writers, artists, musicians, multi-media artists etc apply for a slice of that pie. (It’s divided into aspiring, emerging and established writers).
To give myself an edge, I went to a workshop run by the grants board and what I learnt there was basically this. Say, you get 100 applications for grants. You can dismiss 30 because they are poorly written with spelling mistakes. What you are left with is 70 really good applications and 20 available grants in that area. What do you do? Well, fantasy is not highly respected by the literary world. Having said that some of my friends have received grants over the years. I did get a state grant to go to World Con in Glasgow in 2005. It was worth under $3,000 and covered my air fares and the cost of the con. Everything else I covered myself.
Which brings me back to how do we creative people survive. I came across this interesting post from Alan Baxter on Crowd Sourcing. (This is what Dave did with Save the Dragons). A creative person says, Hey I want to write this book/make this film, design this game but I need the money to do it. If you want to see/watch/play it, then pledge some money and when I get enough, I’ll do it.
Alan Baxter talks about a project involving one of Neil Gaiman’s short stories.
‘Christopher Salmon was asking for funds to make a short film of Neil Gaiman’s short story, The Price. For a fully-realised animated feature he needed $150,000 of funding. Neil Gaiman himself endorsed the idea (which is how I heard about it via Twitter) and the thing went viral. The funding has hit $161,774 and the short film is being made. I kicked in and my contribution will result in me receiving a DVD of the film when it’s made.’
Alan has become involved in a Crowd Sourcing project to run The Emerging Writers Festival in Brisbane, which has hit its goal and will be going ahead. So there are good outcomes.
Here’s another example for an indie tabletop game.
It all seems very egalitarian, thanks to the WWW. In the past, the creative person would find a wealthy patron who would support them and ask for paintings of his family as recompense. Now the creative person asks the general public and if enough people chip in, they can finish the project. If the writer/musician, artist already has a following they may be able to make this work. There are also Indie Publishers attempting this.
Here on Writer Beware, Victoria Strauss analyses a Crowd Sourcing model, where the underlying message seems to be to read the fine print and know what you are getting into.
Meanwhile, I didn’t get a grant, which means teaching for another twelve months (and applying for a grant again next year if I can think up an intersesting project). Meanwhile, I’m keeping my eyes and ears open and watching developments.
Have you come across any Crowd Sourcing projects that look interesting?
Mad Genius Club 
9 responses to “A Ramble on the Writerly Life … Or how do we feed ourselves?”
Interesting
As more and more options become open to writers, they need to make a decision as to which business model to go with. It’s like … aaaah, not more things I have to grapple with, I just want to write!
No kidding! I think the idea of Cloud Financing, so to speak, is so new there’s not much of a track record. Didn’t Steven King try it? Ah, Google. He quit after six chapters because more and more people were downloading without paying for it.
The problem is trusting a writer to finish the story. I donated to Dave, when he wrote to finance moving his dogs and cats. I knew he would finish the story.
But what about new authors? There’s no track record of him or her having ever finished a book. Do you trust them to do it, if they’ve been paid? Or will they slope off and do something else when they hit the hard slog in the middle? So for the beginneres, I think they’re going to have to start with the finished goods. At some point down the line they may be able to reap the cloud for their income.
Pam — with King, it was so many years ago, it doesn’t even apply. There’s a lot more people on the net, now. It’s not the same type of population that was there then. There’s now a tradition of this. All this notwithstanding, crowd sourcing is something that can be useful, but I wouldn’t count on that income.
Good point, Pam. You don’t know with a new author, if they are going to finish the book. Obviously, Stephen King and Dave can finish books.
The articles on satisfying and unsatisfying jobs were interesting. As far as the grants go… well, no government money comes without strings. If you can’t see the strings, run the other way.
Yeah, I’m a cynic. It happens when you spend your day job finding other people’s mistakes, and then trying to convince them they need to fix their mistakes before they send the stuff out to a customer.
Kate with the grants you have ‘acquit the grant’ which means you show where the money went.
When I went to the UK for the World Con in 2005 I provided receipts for my air fares and convention attendance and filled out a form. It was painless.
That sounds like a pretty sensible way of doing it – showing the receipts that prove you spent it on what you applied for. If there’s no hidden expectations lurking to bite you, that can be a viable way of working.
I was raised on the principle of “Everything has a price. If you don’t pay beforehand, you’ll pay later and it will cost you more in ways you don’t anticipate”. Of course, I also have a family who show up in the dictionary when you look up “stubborn”. Right beside my picture!
Kate, the ‘jumping through hoops’ part of the grant process is the actual application. At least at a state level. The grant application form is designed for arts organisations doing projects, not individuals applying to write a book.
I’ve applied for 4 state grants. The only one I got was the Professional Development Grant to go to the UK.
I’ve applied for 3 (might be 4) Lit Board grants and never gotten any. The application form isn’t so bad. I think my genre counts against me. Although I did hear of a friend who got a grant in the round I was turned down in. She applied as an emerging writer.