The Death of the Boozy Lunch?

Robert McCrum’s recent Observer article on the end of the author’s lifestyle prompted fierce debate in the comments below the line, and across social media. In the piece, titled ‘From Bestseller to Bust: is this the end of the author’s life?’, McCrum interviews two reasonably successful midlist authors, Rupert Thomson and Joanna Kavenna, who are both apparently struggling to make ends meet. McCrum blames the credit crunch and the internet for this state of affairs, which has forced Thomson to give up his Central London office (don’t panic – he’s had his loft converted, and writes there instead). Kavenna, who has form for this sort of thing, talks about declining advances, and the expectation for writers to deliver content without pay.

There’s no doubt that many authors are finding it tough these days, but is McCrum’s article an accurate depiction of the modern writer’s life? Most of the novelists I interact with fall into two camps – those who work full-time in paid employment, fitting their writing in around the pressures of a salaried job, and the ones who still write full-time, but make huge sacrifices in terms of their lifestyle and living conditions in order to concentrate on their novels. Neither of these experiences really seemed to be reflected in the Observer piece, so I spoke to four writers (two in full-time jobs, two not), to get a different view of what the ‘author’s life’ is really like.

Nikesh Shukla is the author of two novels, Coconut Unlimited, and Meatspace, due this year from The Friday Project. As well as working full time, Nikesh also writes and helps to organise literary nights in Bristol. When I asked whether the traditional author’s lifestyle was truly under threat, he agreed, but didn’t take the same eulogistic tone as McCrum: ‘Make no bones about it - hardly anyone who is a new or up-and-coming writer now can just write. And before we all take a moment to have a sad face for all the boozy lunches and afternoons in cafes smoking Gauloises and thinking about a particularly obtuse metaphor for hours on end, let's just all remind ourselves that having a job is just life. I think people forget, when they haven't come from the DIY scene, when they haven't had to struggle, to make things for themselves, when they're so bloody preternaturally brilliant they go straight to the top, when they haven't stolen envelopes from work or come in early to send emails or worked through their lunchbreak on edits, when they haven't been a self-starter who's determined to eventually one day have boozy lunches and sit in cafes all afternoon smoking Gauloises and think about a particularly obtuse metaphor for hours on end, when they haven't done any of this they forget that bloody hell, people have jobs to get by.’

By contrast, he says, ‘I have two jobs - I write and I work. I have some freelance gigs. I co-run a literature night. I'm married and have the sole responsibility for doing the bins. I write books and television. I like my Netflix account. I have a terrible work-life balance, because I'm always working. To me, it doesn't seem like the end of the world to wake up at 6am, write for two hours, go to work for 9am work til 1, eat something at my desk while I do writer admin like reply to emails, Tweet, make small edits, book train tickets, work out how to convince my boss to let me leave early to go to London...AGAIN, then work then go home, spend some time with my wife, and then work from 9pm to 1am.’

James Miller

In modern publishing, big advances (even in the ‘low six figures’) are becoming the exception rather than the norm. James Miller was briefly able to write full-time, when the advance for his second novel Sunshine State allowed him to live cheaply in Buenos Aires for six months, but that income is now ‘long gone’. Nowadays, he lives off his income as a university lecturer. James is a senior lecturer in Creative Writing and English Literature at Kingston University, on a half/three quarters contract. For him, this is the ideal occupation to fit alongside his writing: ‘The job is far more flexible than a normal 9-5. There is nothing more deadening to the spirit than ordinary office work, if only because you have to waste so much time with the long hours – even if you finish all your work, you can’t go home. That used to drive me crazy. I’m a total individualist, I like working on my own and I like being in charge - like most writers I have a ‘problem’ with authority and hate ‘team-work’. Academia allows for all of these things. Furthermore, the chance to talk to students about their writing, to discuss literature and ideas is actually quite inspiring; it’s also a chance to be part of a wider creative community (and so mitigates against much of the intense loneliness of being a writer) whilst the security of a regular income reduces the stress of worrying about money (which can also be a huge impediment to writing) or whether what I’m writing is or is not ‘commercial.’

As well as the benefits of the role itself (‘It’s perhaps the only profession in which writing books is intrinsic to the job itself’), Miller also recognises that balancing traditional roles with writing is tricky: ‘During my brief time in advertising and market research I had to keep my writing quiet – we were expected to put all our energies into our job. Once my boss discovered I wasn’t all that ‘committed’ to selling brands to consumers but that I spent my lunch hour (or quiet times in the office) bashing out a novel, my card was marked.’

This is something that Jess Richards would agree with. Before her novel Snake Ropes was picked up by Sceptre, Richards ‘worked full time, and wrote full time. My job was in a college, working with teenagers who were struggling to get through GCSEs and A levels. I loved the job. I also loved writing. Both of these things needed and deserved my full attention, and significant chunks of my heart and soul. Sadly my attention, heart and soul turned out not to be quite big enough. I realised that I could no longer continue to do both, otherwise I'd be dead. So I had to choose.’ In future, she says, ‘the next job I go for might need to be something repetitive or practical, and not involve too much talking or listening. That way, my thoughts are my own and I can think about writing. It would also have to be something where no-one would be particularly aggressive or hurt if I didn't focus on doing it perfectly. I would need to give my effort a percentage and force myself to stick to that. So 30% enthusiasm for a gardening job would leave 70% enthusiasm for writing. Cleaning would get 20%. Decorating might get 25%. That kind of thing might work’

Sam Mills is another who struggled to adapt to office life: ‘I was 12 years old when I wrote my first (unpublished) novel and have been in the habit of writing 1,000 words a day ever since, for the past 26 years. I used to love coming home from school, getting my homework out of the way, and then plunging into my novel in progress. After I graduated, I worked briefly, but I was soon fired because I found it impossible to focus on the boring office work in hand, and was always typing up my novel when my boss wasn’t looking.’ Now, writing full-time, she lives a peripatetic lifestyle, with very little security: ‘As a writer, my income has yo-yoed all over the place, but I have got used to living an insecure life. I’ve never been able to afford to drive or have a car; but then I enjoy travelling on trains and scribbling as I go. So any sacrifices made have been worth it. I love being a writer, so I haven’t minded the years when I have been poor. The main problem recently has been living out of a suitcase; I rented my own place before 2008 but the recession hit publishing badly, so since then I’ve been doing housesits or room rentals and sometimes they have been too cold or noisy to concentrate; but sometimes they’ve been lovely too, such as the current one, which involves a nice warm place and the care of a tomcat.’

Jess Richards

Jess Richards has been in a similar situation since she began writing full time: ‘At this point in time, I don't know how to live, where to live, how to support myself financially... so I have to figure out all of those things. Because I don't have any financial security, I'm trying to live as cheaply as possible for now. Though there's still adjustments needed - I spend more on bags of coffee and pouches of tobacco than food. Which isn't quite right, is it? At the moment, I'm at the tail end of a 'housesitting' assignment, which in reality is 'caretaking' five rural holiday cottages through the winter, in lieu of paying rent. I've been trying (in my mind) to be 'a caretaker who doesn't care', so I can prioritise writing and not get too knackered. But I can't fix doorsteps and cracks in walls and then not love them a little bit. And there's always something here that breaks; it's winter, wild weather and old cottages in an exposed landscape. Everything could possibly go wrong. And sometimes does. At times I've hated it here. But more often than that, I've loved it.

The down side is that it's hard to type when my fingers are numb with cold. And electrical wires breaking during gales, cluster fly and mouse invasions and making sure the rare visitors have clean and ironed bed linen all have to take priority over writing. I'm learning new things, which must only be good, as I'll probably write about them later. I now know all about silicone guns. (It was flooding. A lot.) Writing's about building a whole world sometimes. Mending broken things is a different thing entirely. Each is important. But it doesn't start raining INDOORS if I don't write something, whereas if the latest gale's brought slates down... I'm not sure what's next yet in terms of where to live. Perhaps I'll go exploring and find a clearing in the middle of a wood that doesn't technically belong to anyone. Make a secret room out of old tyres and pallets. The only thing that's stopping me doing that at the moment is the fact that a laptop needs electricity…’

Housing is even an issue for writers who do work, as Miller acknowledges: ‘I’m 37 and I still live like a student. In one sense, it’s okay, I don’t really care about having ‘stuff’ but after a while it gets tiring.  I’ve almost totally lost hope of ever being able to afford my own place – but this has as much to do with the housing crisis and cost of living as anything to do with being a writer. I’m in a very privileged position at the moment as I’m able to live rent free (in my girlfriend’s father’s London flat) so for the first time in my life I’m actually able to save some money, but none of this really changes the fact that my life is incredibly precarious and this has had all sorts of impacts on both my ‘lifestyle’ and my state of mind. Certainly, when I compare my situation with friends from university who got well-paid jobs as accountants or consultants – they now live in large houses in the suburbs, send their children to private school, have savings and pensions – they’re proper ‘grown-ups’ whereas I remain feeling marginalised and very much alienated from what we might call ‘normal middle class lifestyles.’

Sam Mills

McCrum, in his article, talks of literary prizes as an important source of income today, but just as useful are foreign rights deals and grants. Mills, who published three YA novels with Faber before her breakthrough adult book The Quiddity of Will Self, explains that earnings from her backlist help her to keep going while she works on the follow-up: ‘Whilst a UK advance on a novel will rarely cover living costs, writers with a good agent can bump this up with income from foreign rights, US deals, film deals etc. One of my YA novels, Blackout, has been translated into French and is now running as a play in Belgium, so I get a steady trickle of income from that. However, I also do a little editorial freelance work on the side to help with cash-flow (about 5 days a month) and some freelance journalism too, which helps.’

Miller received an Arts Council grant to work on this third novel, which he describes as ‘a real life-line: I had almost totally run out of money and then the award came through – enough money to support me for six months.’ This is a path which Richards is also looking into: ‘At the moment I'm living on the final part of the advance I got for my first two books [Cooking With Bones was released last year]. It will run out, but I count myself hugely lucky to be able to do this for now. I've applied for some funding to buy myself some time to write my third novel, but if I don't get that, I'll have to move somewhere urban where I can get a job that'll cover urban rent and bills.’

One school of thought suggests that working is actually beneficial to authors, keeping them connected to the world they are describing, or simply making the hours when they can write more enjoyable. Shukla says ‘I'd love to write fulltime. But currently, being moved to write in addition to everything else, I don't know what would happen to my motivation to write without having a job to take up my time. Going to a job, meeting people, talking to people, delaying the gratification of writing till those sessions when I have the time, that makes it exciting. It builds in your head. It becomes a thing of excitement. I don't hate it. In fact, it becomes the antidote to a stressful work day. It's important to do other things. James Salter had a whole other career before becoming a writer. Evie Wyld runs a bookshop in tandem with being the best writer in the country.

Working also brings focus for Miller: ‘It makes me more productive. I find that if all I do is write I get very precious and neurotic. I usually only have enough energy for a few hours of intense writing a day – and when I’m free all day there is too much time to give into morbid and melancholy thoughts, to feel that one isn’t ‘in the mood’ – whereas the demands of a job force you to be more pragmatic, to just shut up, grow up and get on with the work

Can authors write about the world whilst living as outsiders? There’s a tradition of writers who double up as low-level bureaucrats, particularly in French literature, where the likes of Huysmans combined their writing with the life of the career civil servant. Jess Richards agrees that working can provide useful experience for authors: ‘I can imagine that living as a hermit (which I am currently still considering as a genuine career option) would be good for writing for a while - in that everything which is inside the mind would come out onto paper. But after a while of 'outpouring' I'd think that something would need to go 'into' the mind - which would have to come from either learning, new experiences and life events, or simply from being around and observing other people. I can't imagine after a year of not speaking to anyone at all, being able to write believable dialogue, for example. It's probably all about balance, this insider/outsider thing. Maybe there are times when the mind's crammed and everything needs to come out in the writing. And other times where research and life and experience needs to go in.’

Miller argues that novelists are outsiders by their nature, regardless of their employment status: ‘If you feel integrated into the world, if you are satisfied (or at least content) having a conventional job, if going shopping or watching sport or going on holiday is enough of a reward then why would you write? You wouldn’t. But then many great writers have had unusual jobs – Kafka and Melville are two authors who immediately spring to mind. In many ways the question of whether one can write and work at the same time is a moot point – these days 99.99% of writers have to work alongside their writing. They have no choice. It’s either work AND write or work and don’t write. The other isn’t actually an option. As a result you have to be disciplined, focused and prepared to make a lot of sacrifices (goodbye social life) but if you have the desire to write, you’ll do it - and writing is infinitely more rewarding than whatever it is you are giving up.’

For Sam Mills, the problems are more practical than philosophical: ‘I personally found it impossible to juggle a full-time job with writing, but this nothing to do with any fanciful ideas about the lifestyle of a writer – it was simply a question of energy! I simply wasn’t robust enough to survive on 5 or 6 hours’ sleep a night and write before or after work; I just sat there yawning over the page and my writing became grey and woolly. When I gave up work, the improvement in my prose style was tremendous. For me, a good night’s sleep is an essential foundation for what I do. However, I am full of admiration for those writers who do combine work with writing’. There are other ways for writers to remain connected to the world they describe, though: ‘You still experience friendships and love affairs. You still face the tragedies of losing loved ones. You meet new people through research, the literary world, your interests. I certainly don’t feel that I have a ‘quiet’ life as a writer; it is just as turbulent and colourful, if not more so, as when I had a job.’

Looking at the causes of the downturn in incomes, McCrum raises the pricing of ebooks, and the impact of digital publishing, as an issue. The authors I spoke to regarded this as a minor concern though. Mills says, ‘I earn much more from physical books than e-books. However, The Quiddity of Will Self received a lot of support from both indies and Waterstones when it came out in hardback, and it had a very striking cover, so this helped the hardback do well. I have been told by commercial novelist friends that their Kindle sales are soaring whilst their physical books are in decline; and by literary novelist friends that their physical sales are high but their Kindle sales are low. So it may be a question of different formats working for different markets/readerships.’ Miller also plays down the issue: ‘I don’t see any difference between ebooks and real books. The more formats my work is available on, the better.’

Nikesh Shukla

So can writing remain a viable career for anyone without another source of income to support them? Nikesh doesn’t predict a big shift in the demographics of the literary scene: ‘People will always write. Maybe they'll just have more realistic expectations for it. Maybe writing will become a thing people do for love not money. Because none of us ever sat down to write expecting to write a bestseller and be a millionaire, right? ‘Cos if we did, we're doing this for the wrong reasons - and there are better-paid careers out there.’

On the other hand, bits of writing could become a career: ‘there's more to being a writer than just writing books - in the last few years, I've diversified into television, theatre, reviews. I don't just write fiction. I actively chase other projects. An advantage of this is that it helps you improve, having to write for different audiences in different formats. But mainly, because it means you're working on projects that pay. Who knows what'll happen in the future. Just work hard now. And if you have to supplement your income by working as a barista, greater people than yourself have done it.’  

It’s clear from all these responses that writers are willing to make sacrifices, in terms of time or money, to work on their novels, and fears of a large demographic shift towards the independently wealthy may be unfounded (and hey, imagine how awful it would be if publishing ended up just being full of upper-middle class white men from Oxbridge). In many ways, the publishing industry is going through the same problems faced by the music industry a decade ago. New digital methods of consumption have meant that traditional sources of revenue have been squeezed hard, to the point where a solo musician would need to attract 230,000 listens on Spotify each month to make minimum wage (the figures are contested – this is a conservative estimate). To compensate, concert tickets, previously a loss leader, have emerged as an important earner, as has merchandise. Maybe authors will be able to find similar solutions, appearing at events and festivals, or contributing to anthologies.

Authors like Naomi Alderman and Steven Hall have written for video games, while Courttia Newland, for example, writes for the theatre and regularly appears as a speaker. Editorial work and creative writing courses are also ways to supplement an author’s income whilst remaining within the literary world. E-publishing enables some writers to take control of their back catalogue, while maybe Kickstarter could replace the publisher’s advance for authors with a following. The thought of ‘no more boozy lunches and Gauloises’ is a sad one, but then Keep the Aspidistra Flying, published in 1936 reminds us that this was always the lifestyle of the few, and not the norm, and literature hasn’t died out yet.