Working Writers
Written for student participants on the Writing East Midlands/University of Nottingham Write Here Residency on the Business of Writing
Working Writers
‘Working writers’ come in different shapes and sizes. Some writers follow an entirely different absorbing professional career (doctors, lawyers, accountants …) and write in their other life, sometimes performing their work/helping others to write occasionally. Perhaps they have servants.
Some writers have jobs –part-time – nothing to do with literature, which are either similarly absorbing, or deliberately non-absorbing – so that the rest of the time they can use their creative brain for writing, performing, maybe giving workshops now and again, taking part in a writing project etc.
Some manage to make the money they earn from the writing and writing-related activity pay the bills and earn a full-time freelance living this way. In order to do this, they have to have a large number of strings to their bow, be able to pull on a different hat sometimes at a moment’s notice, and ‘diversify’. This is called ‘having a portfolio career’. Perhaps because you need a ‘portfolio’ to carry around your many accomplishments and credentials.
If you are doing any kind of freelance work in any of these different ‘working writer’ roles, you will have to be self-employed, often alongside also being someone’s employee from time to time or permanently.
So what can you do when you’re self-employed as a writer (either a few times a year or every day)?
If you can write, you can work towards getting books published. Whatever you write you can write differently. I’m a poet. I also write plays. I have also written a libretto. I could probably write a short story if I could be bothered. I could probably write a novel if someone stood with a gun to my head for a very long time. I am writing this. If you’re a writer, you’re a writer.
You can perform your work. You can charge to be entertaining.
You can perfect the art of ‘writing to order’ and stand in a market hall or railway station (I speak from experience), asking people pertinent questions and delivering them within 10 minutes, a piece of writing specially for them. They will love it.
If you can write you can encourage others to write. You can lead them in writing activity, write with them. You can learn more and more about creativity, about your particular specialty and gather what you consider to be other good writers’ work and show it to people for inspiration. You can pass on your craft, in cobbled together groups of friends, outsiders, then more formal groupings – in Adult Ed, Further Ed, Higher Ed ….
You could relate to children (yes, this is possible). Schools will welcome you with open arms if you are what they are looking for. You can write with children, make language fun. Make them think school is actually a good place to be at times, even if they’re hopeless at spelling.
If you can facilitate writing, you can facilitate reading, appreciation, run a reading group. You can probably talk on your favourite subject or your favourite writer’s work and spread your knowledge.
If you have some sense of what’s accomplished, you can adjudicate a competition, be a reviewer, an evaluator of events, of written material.
I could go on and on about what you could do, but it would take a lot of time and I think you’re probably getting the gist. Editing, proof reading, performance coaching … Then when you’ve done all that, of course you can start advising everybody else how to do it all because you’re now an expert. So when you’re not doing it, you’re talking about it. This is called ‘consultancy’.
And all this is before you might start thinking about unique strings to your by now very busy bow. I have a musical background – it’s easy for me to work with musicians. I have knowledge of the mental health sector – I can work comfortably with all kind of mental health conditions. I could work with a visual artist (despite being refused entry to the GCE Art class) and a dancer (putting behind me the traumas of never being able to point my toes properly in ballet lessons and getting my legs slapped).
And I won’t go into the projects you could devise, lead, be part of till another chapter.
Of course, you won’t do all of this (unless you are unquestionably mad). You will pick and choose whatever portfolio suits YOU. The YOU is in capitals because ultimately whatever you do, you will be asked to do work or will succeed in your work because of who YOU are and how reliable, approachable, and workable with YOU are.
Which only leaves the question why? What on earth would make you take on and develop a life of uncertainty, no definite opportunities, no sick pay, pension, security, no guarantee it can all carry on, that balls will stay juggling, mortgages get paid etc? (you see now why most working writers have a part-time relatively stable income in one part of their life …). What is it that keeps you doing it?
I can only speak for myself here:
Everything I do in my freelance writer career involves other people. And I’m a people person. I reckon I’ve met many many more people in my career of all ages, backgrounds, abilities, personalities (mm) than I ever would have done in any other. And when I say ‘met’ I don’t mean like a receptionist would. I mean ‘get to know’ – not deeply, but certainly enough to learn from them all the different ways there are of being human. Simply through writing with them, sharing my writing with them, or them sharing their writing with me.
Writing is fundamental to our creativity (I think I have just swapped my hat for my very serious brown one now). People write to record their experience, go deeper into it, share it, seek reassurance for it, ask for others to feel the same, show off with it, find themselves through it, protest through it, whisper, speak, shout. They write how it is to feel love, hate, anger, joy, envy, fear, anxiety, quietness, irritation, peace. They write to uncover memory, taboo, to say we matter, we are here. They want to say how it is, how it really is, who they really are. And most of all, they learn that they retain their uniqueness through it while recognizing that other people relate to who they are.
When writing communally, people get to know each other very quickly – become honest with a cleaner kind of honesty, and learn to support and understand everyone else. It’s refreshing.
But while they are joining others in a writing environment, they are not just coming there to write. They are finding a purpose, coming out of their houses, normal lives, coming to meet other people, to socialize, share experience, learn. They have a goal, a yen for achievement, their minds are active and questioning. They find they can fill the page, get and give support, and most of all laugh, have fun, get moved, cry. Above all, feel.
A writer who facilitates this process in whatever way, whether by leading courses, writing others’ stories, sharing their writing in public, is the catalyst for this process. I don’t know much more reward than that. Because of all this, writing and reading is particularly good for the vulnerable, the excluded. People suffering. Writing helps people without reminding them they are in pain, without someone trying to advise, find solutions, give therapy. Writing makes people feel ‘normal’ for a while, part of the world, in control.
Let’s not get too far from reality though. That was passion speaking. Of course this life can, at times, sometimes too many times, be pretty horrible. Difficult people, unreliable organizations, lack of funding, red tape, ‘you want how much? We have only ever paid one person that and she showed us how to bake a cake’. But this piece is about the reasons I keep doing it, not the times I wonder whether to give up doing it (and don’t) …………
and some of those reasons are:
• because now and again someone says ‘you made me see I could write’; ‘you set me off’; ‘you gave me permission’
• because someone said ‘you told my story. How did you know?’ and I thought ‘hang on a minute, don’t take my story, that’s my story’ till I realized ‘o yes, it’s all our stories’
• because children realize they are special when you tell them even if you can’t do literacy you can have a brilliant idea and school didn’t really teach them that yet
• because watching 200 children singing my words with an orchestra accompanying was the best feeling I have had in my life
• because if you ask someone to tell you their story, they will say ‘oh nothing important about me’ then talk to you all day about their incredible life.
• because every day I do something I once thought I couldn’t do
• because when people come together to write they are not just coming together to write.
• because having one passion in this life is a necessary thing
• because I learn something new every day
• because I don’t know any other career where I would have been paid to be in a pit shaft, a cave, a cowboy outfit, a Castle, a farm, a high security prison, a well dressing, a market stall ……
• because I can choose
• because 9-5 in an office for me is rigor mortis setting in
• because driving through the Derbyshire dales and thinking I’m paid to do it is pretty good, even in the rain
• because today x came to the group without his carer and y read out her work
• because they want to call themselves ‘writing for fun’ because fun is the one thing they always have
• because I can’t not
• because I am writing this on a sofa at 8.15 am in a café in Nottingham with a large tea and a bacon sandwich and the sun is on me and the light just right for writing this, and when I put down this pen I can shut my eyes and I might just sleep right here because my meeting isn’t for another hour ……..
• because writing is my living in both senses of the word
Cathy Grindrod
2011
