I went to a writers’ conference recently, and I have to confess that for the most part, I found it a difficult, challenging and disheartening experience. Given that part of the conference’s point — the point of any similar event, surely — is to inspire and to encourage and to create connection and solidarity between writers, I came away feeling demotivated, discouraged and more isolated than I had before I went.
A recurring thread throughout the day seemed to be speakers talking about how hard it all is. Actually, a qualification is needed there. What the speakers seemed to be talking about was how hard it is to get an agent, to keep an agent, to get a publishing deal, to get work published, to sell books, to earn money. If someone was managing to do these things, the equation seemed to be that they were successful. What I inferred from all this was that if you didn’t manage to do these things, you were not a successful professional writer.
Things got off to the strangest of beginnings when the keynote speaker regaled us with stories of years and years and years of setbacks, false starts, lapsed deals, unwanted novels, being dropped, being rejected.
There were two especially painful points in the writer’s opening speech. One was when they talked about how important an aspiration it is for their books to be sold in supermarkets, because that’s where a lot of books get sold. (I was surprised to hear that, and must do some research into the data which analyses book sales to get a better insight into such things.)
The other — the saddest bit — was the dilemma they said they now routinely face, torn on one hand between writing the kind of book they want to write but which their publisher does not want to publish, and on the other hand, writing books which are more or less the same as the books they’ve already written, which the publisher is keen to publish.
People will devour these variations on a similar theme as e-books or else they’ll buy them in supermarkets. Getting books into supermarkets was genuinely and humourlessly presented as a serious and lofty aspiration. The publisher supports and encourages this because it will make the writer lots of money after years of earning next to nothing. (The publisher’s and agent’s financial benefits were not mentioned, but were not presumably insignificant.)
I was deeply disturbed by all this, and also quite angry about it, during and after the event.
It got me thinking about what it means to be a “professional” writer. Is it that you devote lots of your time and effort to writing? Or that you get paid for writing? There’s room for crossover between the two, but the gulf between the two can also be immense.
In our world where the moral worth of so many things is intrinsically linked to whether or not you make money from it, I suspect the majority of people these days would only define a truly professional writer as someone who earns a tidy living from what they write; anything else would probably be dismissed as amateurish self-indulgence.
The etymology of “profession” has Latin roots which are all about the act of open, solemn or public declaration. There are religious undertones, too: c. 1200, the word “professioun” meant the vows you took upon joining a holy order. By the early fifteenth century, “profession” had started to denote an “occupation one professes to be skilled in, a calling” — that latter word retains some of the spiritual higher purpose carried over from the earlier usage. The component of money needing to change hands only filters discreetly in much later — presumably linked to, and happening during, the Industrial Revolution.
So from this, I take it that professionalism once focused on a dedication to something that occupied your time and brain and energy, something which had a dignity and respectability to it, something worth doing for its own sake. There’s also a relationship implicit in there — that idea of public declaration — a commitment to do something which relates to someone else, which is shared, which reaches outward rather than looking inward — to God, back in the year 1200, or latterly, some kind of earthbound recipient — in other words, an audience.
This way of viewing professionalism echoes the characteristics I identified when I was talking earlier on this blog about art as opposed to creativity — I don’t think that’s a coincidence. Over time, however, capitalism crept in to re-inflect the process, as it so often does, cementing an idea that professional value has to equate to financial value. The intrinsic importance of doing work for its own sake or for the audience’s sake gets shoved aside. The act of writing gets commodified so that it can be put up on a supermarket shelf.
It doesn’t have to be this way. I don’t think I’m being naïve by saying that. I recognise that it’s easy for me to talk like this as someone who has not yet tried to get his novels published or to get himself an agent. Certainly, for now, I’m really enjoying writing for the sake of writing, trying to become a better writer by going through the process of writing (not just by talking or thinking about it.)
I hope with all my heart that when I do eventually connect with the marketplace, I have the courage and the resolve to stick to my guns, and that I keep writing what I want to write, the way I want to write it. I also hope I don’t live to regret writing this, and that the day will never come when someone stops me in a supermarket aisle to tell me how much they’re looking forward to reading my new book which is sitting in their trolley, because they’re sure it’ll be just like all the other recent ones of mine they’ve bought there so many times before.
