I suppose I am a writer as there are fourteen different books with my name on the cover and I’ve also published over a thousand articles. I also suppose that I always wanted to be one because if you look carefully at the Lancastrian magazines of the early 1960s you will find (very) short stories by me. But I don’t like the term for all sorts of reasons. We all write – or nearly all of us – just as we all talk and there are countless Twitter users who have more followers than I have readers. Then there’s the business of saying, “I’m a writer” which sounds very pretentious and excites both irritation and envy. According to one US survey 81% of the population want or intend to write a book so having actually written one can put barriers up. They are surely likely to respond, “Well I’ve never heard of you” or “I was in Waterstone’s the other day and I couldn’t see any sign of your books”. Fact: there were more than a quarter of a million books published in this country last year and you are likely to have heard of a fraction of one per cent of their authors, probably the same fraction that you would see displayed in Waterstone’s. There’s also the assumption that if you say you’re a writer it will be assumed you have written a novel whereas the majority of books are not novels. My preference for self-description is “essayist” which sounds more obscure and old-fashioned.
But the main reason for not saying I am a writer is that I don’t make a living out of it. Actually, hardly anyone does: the Author’s Licensing and Collecting Society has 90,000 members and reports that two thirds of these make less than £4000 pa from writing. And it’s getting worse. For most authors advances have disappeared so you don’t get a penny until the book actually sells and I can also report that the kind of fees I get for articles are pretty much the same as they were in the 1980s despite decades of inflation. The underlying reason for this is, of course, the internet which offers an almost infinite range of sources of information and opinion and reduces the sales of individual books as well as of magazines and newspapers in the vast majority of cases. The distribution of income from writing is structured much like that from sport or music or acting: the structure is a pyramid with a tiny handful of people at the top making enormous incomes and most of the rest not close to making a living. The history of writing is like a parabola and we have returned to eighteenth century conditions. Back then you had your own pamphlets printed, now you set up your own blog and see what comes of it. In between, say a century ago, if you could persuade a publisher to print your book and an editor to publish your articles there was at least a half-decent income to be had. That is no longer the case. Advice on freelancing which I used to dish out in a lecture on the subject even twenty years ago has been made largely irrelevant by the possibilities of the internet. Nevertheless, there are, in my opinion, some eternal pieces of good advice to would-be writers:
1. DON’T GIVE UP THE DAY JOB
In my early thirties I did think about giving up the day job. I had published two books and the most recent had been widely and favourably reviewed. I had a regular slot in a well known magazine. Why not just be a “writer”? Two well known people, one a respected editor, the other “the most sought after documentary maker in British television” advised me against this. Both seemed mildly obsessed with my pension rights and I learned that pensions are like girlfriends and boyfriends: if you’ve got one you tend to take them for granted, but if you haven’t the lack can be something of an obsession. Both said I should only give up the day job if I hated it and I didn’t; being a university lecturer had its (increasingly) annoying features, but I enjoyed teaching and many other aspects of university life. Giving up would have been a catastrophic miscalculation. In fact the terms of trade were beginning to move heavily against freelance writers and the publishers of my second book went bankrupt putting an end to that particular income stream. Another of the warnings both my advisors gave me was that a freelance writer ends up doing a lot of things they don’t want to do: “editing FT supplements on dodgy countries” was one example given.
So I was always able to treat my writing income as pocket money and, as pocket money, it could be pretty good. Royalties themselves were usually disappointing, but in the market for articles before the internet, boosted as it was by the Murdoch empire, an article could in extremis secure you a fee, generous expenses, further syndication fees and then be recycled into a book. And books, strange as it may seem, can produce income for the author much greater than the book’s own royalties. I wrote a book on the idea of amateurism which has never sold many copies, but it was a Times book of the week, is often quoted and I have been paid four figure sums to talk about the subject on several occasions. But it’s still only nice pocket money and you couldn’t live on it.
In any case one should consider the possibility of the dream coming true: you are still young, you write your book; they love it, you win a major prize, film and television rights are sold, your income is in the top 1% . . . And then what? You want to spend your life having to write, signing volumes in American bookshops, talking about your work to interviewers who haven’t actually read it? It’s not that wonderful a way of life and most of the successful authors I’ve known didn’t seem particularly happy.
2. IF YOU’VE GOT “WRITERS BLOCK” GIVE UP
I’ve spent my life as (in no particular order) entertainments officer for three sons (and latterly six grandchildren), gardener, teacher, husband, cricket captain, Burnley fan, traveller, tennis player. By the time I ever got round to writing I knew exactly what I wanted to say: it was in my head and I just wrote it out. I had no time for perfectionism. You say it as well as you can on the day and move on. I have watched perfectionists at work; their levels of production tend to be low and are sometimes non-existent. From the point of view of a compulsive essayist such as myself “writers’ block” is for wannabees not essayists though I will admit that there have been some highly successful authors who started as wannabees. I think I should also admit that if you had (say) written three highly successful detective stories with the same hero and your publisher had offered you a ludicrously generous contract for a fourth whereas you really wanted to do something completely different then I could imagine a desperate sense of blockage occurring.
3. CULTIVATE YOU CONTACTS
When it comes to writing articles you might succeed sometimes by sheer ability, by submitting “pieces” to editors that are so good nobody could turn them down. When you are starting that’s what you have to do and later on, when editors retire or magazines merge you have to do something like it all over again. But you wouldn’t get to a hundred articles that way let alone a thousand. For that you have to have an editor who will trust you with his or her readership and publish you routinely. In my lifetime I’ve had between half a dozen and a dozen who fell into that category and when I lost them in each case it was always some kind of crisis. And you have to accept that it is not an equal relationship, at least for most of us, any more than the relationship with a manager is an equal one for most footballers. If you’re told, “I don’t think this piece really works” or “I don’t think this is right for our readers” you go away and do something else; you don’t say, “Of course it does, you idiot”. Usually you should write any piece with a very specific editor, outlet and audience in mind and it can’t be recycled, but must be completely rewritten. There are exceptions, however. I was once told by an editor at the Daily Telegraph, “I don’t think this is really for us.” But, unusually, he then added, “But I think The Guardian might like it” and even gave me the relevant contact. So they did and it ended up being syndicated in more countries than any other article I ever wrote.
Lincoln Allison November 2021
(This was the guest article in the 2022 edition of the Old Lancastrian Club Newsletter. It has also appeared on a US website.)