Lake Terrace Night Talk 丨 Writing and Income

I have been teaching for many years and have mixed feelings about teaching. It must be admitted that no matter how people advocate the benefits of creative writing, in essence, this profession helps to solve the problem of writers' jobs, and of course, it can also satisfy students' desire to create to some extent. (ICphoto/Photo)

In the midsummer of 2016, I met and talked to graduate students from the Creative Writing Class at Renmin University in the northern suburbs of Boston. We talked about all sorts of issues. Zheng Asked about the income of American writers, and several girls booed that he should not mention money, as if it was an embarrassing topic. I said it was normal, but Chekhov actually said that he wrote to make money, to make a lot of money. But he never cut corners in his writing, and every ruble earned hard. A writer's income is an important part of a writing career and should be seriously discussed.

Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) has a classic statement in this regard: "No one writes for money except for fools." "In essence, writing is to sell literature for a living, is the way for writers to survive, it is best to face it, try to explain it thoroughly." Writers who write in the West must have agents and pay them a commission, usually 15% of the income of the work they represent. Publishers are entrepreneurs, always doing everything possible to protect their own interests, often taking advantage of writers, and the terminology and rules of the publishing industry are confusing, so writers need agents to protect their own interests. For rookie writers, publishers often have to sign contracts for two books. In the eyes of many people, this is a win-win business: the author's first two books have been published, and the publisher has bought two books at the same time without paying a high price. Many young writers are eager to sign a double-book contract to give some security to their initial writing career, but most of them are unaware of the cattiness of this.

I know a good American short story writer who, upon his debut, signed a double-book contract with a big publishing house: a short story collection and a long story. The short story collection came out quickly, but the long ones were not written smoothly. He is good at short stories, not very good at writing long stories, and has never finished it. In ten years, the prepaid royalties were spent, and his long works could not be written, and eventually became a juvenile novel, and the publisher reluctantly accepted. The writer was a master of short stories, and if he hadn't devoted his ten years of energy to long stories that he wasn't good at, he would have been more successful in short stories. Qiu Xiaolong, a Chinese novelist familiar to many, has a different experience. His first novel, The Death of the Red Hero, was favored by St. Martin's Press, and they signed him a three-book contract. Qiu Xiaolong was a little flattered and signed with them. Since the American publisher didn't get his three books at a fraction of the cost, they didn't invest energy and resources in publicity and promotion, allowing his first three to run wild in the market, and they sold mediocrely in the United States. But in Europe, Joo Xiaolong bookmarked it one by one, and the publishers there naturally promoted every book, and as a result, he had more readers in Europe over the years, especially in Germany and France. I never dared to sign a double-book contract because I didn't want to put too much pressure on myself and wasn't sure if I could write it on time. If a book is not finished, I will never sign a contract. However, many successful American novelists tend to sign a contract with a publisher, get an advance, and then concentrate on finishing the book. This is the traditional practice – writers often live on advances from publishers. Even though some very successful writers are not short of money, they do so. Jonathan Freson's Revision was sold to American booksellers and international publishers with only one outline.

In general, American writers make a living in three ways: selling books to earn royalties, teaching, and doing film and television. In the eyes of most people, being able to make a living from royalties is a sign of success for writers, and many young writers claim that their ultimate goal is not to teach. This is different from the situation in China, where only individual writers can write full-time. Many successful young writers are really not interested in teaching, and they want to seize the momentum and write more best-selling books. Occasionally, a very small number of novelists even receive millions of dollars in advances; at first glance, the writer has since been well fed. But it is not so simple, if the book can not earn back the huge advance, no one will dare to publish the author's book in the future. As far as I know, most publishers have paid such a large advance and ended up losing a lot. It's a bit like killing a chicken and an egg, killing a writer's writing career. Writers should pay more attention to their long-term development, and earning more royalties is only to ensure that they can continue to write good books, rather than selling themselves short. Consistently high-quality writing is the goal.

Film and television revenue is somewhat like an upstart, often six or seven figures, but it is not always a job. It's another kind of art, far from fiction, and long-term work will make you become unfamiliar with fiction writing. For example, domestic novelists Liu Heng and Wang Shuo both chose the creation of film scripts, and eventually stayed away from novel writing. There are exceptions, of course, as both Graham Green and Ruth Jabawala write film scripts, but they do not write themselves, and their mastery of the art of film and television has also developed and refurbished the form of their novels. Although they were masters of writing film scripts, the novel was always their main art.

I have been teaching for many years and have mixed feelings about teaching. It must be admitted that no matter how people advocate the benefits of creative writing, in essence, this profession helps to solve the problem of writers' jobs, and of course, it can also satisfy students' desire to create to some extent. Colleges hire writers not professors, but artists, so writers on campus still have to publish their work continuously to stay on the job for a long time. I started teaching poetry at Emory University, eight years after the least conflict with writing in my teaching career. Teaching poetry is not the same as teaching fiction, relying on improvisation in class, and you don't have to read a lot of manuscripts before class, and you don't need to spend a lot of time preparing. Moreover, poets do not have to write at their desks for eight or nine hours a day, as novelists do, but concentrate on short-term writing, and after one or two hours a day they can do something else. In addition, dealing with others can also be stimulated and easily inspired, so teaching is a very good profession for poets. In addition, no poet can live entirely on royalties, and teaching has become their best choice.

Novelists teach differently. The energy spent on students' assignments and classes is the same thing as the energy devoted to their own work; and everyone's energy is limited, and teaching sometimes makes people feel like they are wasting their lives. It can be said that in order to make a living, novelists teach in "demolishing the eastern wall to make up for the western wall". They regret that they cannot devote their youthful energy and all their time to their work, and occasionally hear individual novelists calling for someone to give them a sum of money because they are "tired" of teaching. However, teaching often nourishes writers, especially literature, allows people to constantly deal with great works, and also sets a benchmark for their own writing. There are also a few writers who like to teach, and even say that the class makes them "refreshed". According to my observation, the novelist's teaching is similar to a kind of unique "siege" state - people on the outside want to rush in, while people inside complain that they have wasted too much time and energy, but they dare not rush out, because they are too old to fight again in the literary world. I know a once-successful novelist who is still teaching in his eighties and enjoys it; he tells me that he has come to terms with the fact that his writing career has come to an end, that he earns less than $100 a year in royalties but earns more than $200,000 a year. That is, teaching gave him a comfortable old age. In the long run, if you can get a tenured teaching position, teaching is a safe choice.

There has been a new phenomenon in recent years, with some once-very successful middle-aged and elderly novelists beginning to teach at universities. Since they had not entered the industry before, it was now difficult to obtain tenured teaching positions, and they could only work as lecturers, and their salaries were much lower than those of their peers, and they had to be renewed every two or three years. But why do they still teach? Obviously, their creative peak has passed, and teaching can bring them a stable income to get rid of the constraints of the book market. So, if they start by teaching and writing, rather than writing without distraction, can they write their best work? It's hard to say, but one thing is certain: writing is a long career, successes and failures are hard to predict, and sometimes risk-taking is necessary. Even so, we should also consider it as a whole and rationally choose our own way of survival.

Hakin