The Devaluation of Writing-as-Work

This chapter considers the ways that writing-as-work is also devalued by writers themselves in the ways that they conceive of and experience their writing lives. This chapter offers analysis of writers’ motivations, goals and dreams, and understandings of success, arguing that these combine to further the devaluing of writing that is begun by the publishing industry’s treatment of writers. It considers the literature around cultural work as not-work, drawing on ideas of a calling, sacrificial labour, and psychic income. It presents findings which complicate notions of writing-as-work, finding it to be both/and work and not-work in shifting ways which both undermine and nurture writers.