Manual For Fiction Writers, Block, Lawrence [best books to read for beginners txt] 📗

rent while he went on writing. Again, he was taking a chance instead of playing it safe.

It's worth noting, though, that the chances he took were sane ones. If he was walking a tightrope, he was not doing so without a net. If he'd failed at the beginning, the worst thing that could have happened is that he'd have had to find another job. If his big adventure novel had failed, he'd have had to go on tending bar, or look for something with more long-range promise. But no one was going to starve to death because he wanted to be a writer.

This talk of starving puts me in mind of another attitude that's important if one is to be comfortable as a free-lance writer. You have to have a pretty high threshold for financial insecurity. If a regular paycheck is emotionally essential to you, perhaps you'd be well advised to stay with a regular job.

I was very fortunate in this respect. I started writing so early in life that my ordinary expenses were extremely low. The last job I held before taking up writing fulltime was in a literary agency, where my base pay was sixty dollars a week before taxes. That doesn't sound like much money now, and it wasn't much money then, either.

My low standard of living made the small sums of money I could earn writing more significant than they'd have been otherwise. If I went home from the office and wrote a three-thousand-word pulp story and sold it for a cent a word, that was half a week's income right there. And, once I'd left the job, I didn't have to hit the bestseller list in order to match my previous income. Before very long I had a standing assignment writing a book a month for a paperback publisher. The pay was six hundred dollars a book, which was more than double what my salary had been.

All of this was helpful early on. As I grew older and acquired a wife and children and a higher standard of living, what helped keep me from going crazy was a temperament which took financial insecurity for granted. This is not to say that I find poverty a treat, or that I am not aggravated by slow-pay publishers and inconvenienced by the stretches of financial hardship that seem to be an inescapable part of the writing life. Sometimes a pile of bills and dunning letters can have a paralyzing effect on just about anyone. But most of the time my writing goes on independent of my solvency or lack thereof.

This is true of most of the people I know who function successfully as free-lance writers. But not everyone is so constituted. I know a number of established professional writers who simply lack the temperament required for fulltime free-lancing. They continue to hold forty-hour-a-week jobs, jobs which they often profess to hate, simply because they are not comfortable without the security of a regular paycheck. In several cases, there's no question but that they could earn more if they gave up their jobs. And they know this, but some of them have found out fulltime self-employment cuts their writing production to the bone because they can't work effectively when burdened with all that anxiety.

It has always seemed to me, on the other hand, that writing is infinitely more secure than any employment could hope to be. All my friends who hold jobs could conceivably be fired. Who can fire me? Even a tenured college professor could one day see his college go out of business, and then where would he be? I, meanwhile, can go on writing for a variety of publishers, adapting to changes in the marketplace, and all without a care for compulsory retirement rules or other abominations.

Of course I can't look forward to a pension, and I have to pay my own medical insurance, and I don't get any fringe benefits or sick leave or paid vacations. Nor am I guaranteed a day's pay just by showing up for work in the morning; if I don't produce anything, neither do I earn anything. I can generally accept all that. But not everybody can.

There's another essential quality in the writer's temperament, and it seems on the surface so obvious that I came close to overlooking it altogether. Quite simply, you have to like the work.

By this I don't mean that the physical act of sitting at a typewriter has to be enjoyable in and of itself. Most writers hate the process, to one extent or another, and everybody hates it now and then. (This is an anomaly of writing, and an interesting one at that. Most of the painters I know enjoy the act of painting, and almost every musician I've known loves to play so much that he goes on doing it after his day's work is done. But writers often hate writing.)

What a writer must enjoy, or at least be able to tolerate, is the utterly solitary nature of the work. When all is said and done, writing is a matter of sitting alone at a desk, staring more often than not at a blank wall, and turning thoughts into words and putting the words on paper.

I know a man who free-lanced for a while some years ago. He started off working at home, then rented a hotel room so he would have an office to