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.