Credit: @cartist on Unsplash
Also Counts as Writing (2)
It’s been a long week. A long month. Let’s call it a long year, although the calendar tells me it’s only been two months. It’s not a complaint as such. More an observation.
There was a time, way back in the past, when I worked Monday to Friday at a real job with a real salary, and at weekends, I didn’t work. I did…other things, I guess. Then full-time parenting was my first experience of working seven days a week with no weekends off. And no pay, obviously. I found it hard going, but on I went.
During the pandemic, I had a long think about what I wanted to do with my life. I had a lot of interests, a lot of things I could try to make into a full-time job. I had just started teaching crafts when the first lockdown happened – I never went back to it. I found a book that I’ve since recommended to others – How to Be Everything, by Emilie Wapnick (there’s a TED talk for anyone interested). It’s about people who have a lot of things they could be, or want to be, and how to, well, BE those things. I’d been a few different things (lawyer, mother, craft-maker, craft-teacher) but the thing I really wanted to do was write. The conditions of lockdown made it possible to focus on writing, and in early 2021, I did a course in flash fiction, and there’s a fairly straight line between that, and where I am now.
The thing about deciding to write full-time, is that there’s no ‘job’, no ‘career’ as a writer of literary fiction. There’s no ‘salary’. Back in Renaissance times, artists had Patrons. Now, we have Late-Stage Capitalism, and that’s a whole different story. Make what the Market wants. What sells is good, what doesn’t sell is bad. But it is not the point of literary fiction to make a product for the market to sell. Thankfully, where I live – Ireland – artists are supported by both the Arts Council and the government. I have been lucky, since 2021, to receive support from Arts Council twice, by way of the Agility grant. In 2022, I was lucky enough to be one of those chosen to be part of a three-year pilot project – Basic Income for Artists – where 2,000 artists across various disciplines are paid a monthly sum to get on with making art (and report back about how this affects the ability to make art, and the well-being of artists when they are being paid). Money is immensely useful in our Late-Stage Capitalism world – it’s nice to be able to eat, heat our homes, live. But for me, being paid by my country means more to me than just the money. For me, the first time I changed my social media bio to read ‘Writer’ was when the day I got the notification that I had received my first Arts Council funding. I cried in my car, and made the change.
And this is the thing. We make the work; the work is important; we get paid for the work. The money is reward for the work, but also validation of the work. As a writer, I now work seven days a week. I get paid (at the moment). At weekends, maybe I should do other things, but I’m usually at my desk, relishing time uninterrupted by school schedules (drop-off, pick-up), doing the work I love. The Basic Income project finishes later this year, and for the past few weeks I have been working on funding applications that will, if I am lucky, keep me doing the work I love. And that’s why the time I spent wrestling with difficult online forms, the time I spent updating my CV, the time I spent wrangling words to answer the why, why, why this project at this time, the sweat of making my writing samples as good as I could get them – that’s why all of this time-consuming, exhausting, and seemingly non-creative work, Also Counts as Writing.
Comments
Post a Comment