The Lived Experience of Making a Living from Writing

This chapter considers some of the literature on the typical characteristics of cultural work and applies these ideas to findings from my research which explore the lived experience of making a living from writing fiction, looking at project-based work, freelance work, and portfolio work. It investigates how writers get paid for their fiction work, including the receipt of advances, royalties, and payment for translations and adaptations, and considers the unpredictable, inconsistent and insufficient nature of income from writing fiction. It explores the strategies that writers employ to cope with this precarity, such as working multiple jobs (including various kinds of ‘writerly’ work), living frugally, and managing their money carefully. It explores the idea of writing as a career (or not) and shows how ‘being published’ functions as a form of accreditation which grants writers access to ‘writerly’ work. This chapter lays a foundation for the rest of the book, showing that writing work is, overall, unpredictable, inconsistently paid and unreliable, with writers having little sense of agency or control over their writing life, and argues that the structures and processes of the UK publishing industry work to disadvantage writers and devalue writing-as-work.