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A writer’s riches

P.G. Wodehouse (image in the public domain)One of the most bril­liant (and fun­ny) writ­ers in the Eng­lish lan­guage was P. G. Wode­house, he of Jeeves fame. In his hey­day he was enor­mous­ly suc­cess­ful in print, on Broad­way, and Hol­ly­wood. So it is strik­ing to read that he once wrote (in a let­ter, appar­ent­ly) about the free­lance life, that “One has to beg for one’s mon­ey as if it were a loan instead of being one’s right­ful earn­ings long overdue.”

It’s very hard to make a liv­ing as a writer. Read about writ­ers’ lives and you find that more often than not, writ­ers go through hard times. Per­haps it is some­thing about writ­ers them­selves, but a lack of funds is very much part of their lives. There’s that old joke: What do you call a writer with­out a (gain­ful­ly employed) part­ner? Homeless.

Yet, for rea­sons I do not know, if you tell peo­ple you are a writer, more often than not, they assume you are rich. In par­tic­u­lar, kids think that. What’s more, if you are a “suc­cess­ful” writer (you decide what that means) peo­ple will assume you are very rich. Even with­in the pub­lish­ing world, pub­lish­ers and edi­tors don’t care much about the finan­cial health of their writer’s lives. Per­haps they should not. But the truth is (as per Wode­house) it’s a source of ten­sion that is almost nev­er talked about. 

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