Have You Earned This?
The first time I was asked the question, I had only the vaguest sense of what it meant. I was in a graduate fiction workshop in Boston; someone pointed to a particularly elaborate (read: florid) sentence in my short story and said, ‘I’m just wondering: have you earned this?’
The sentence was, I remember, a description of a reflection in a puddle: disruptive, implausible, a little in love with itself. It might even have involved a sunset. And I understood that the question about it was a criticism: this line is bad; this line shouldn’t be there; you have not earned this line.
If someone is moved to ask you, ‘Have you earned this?’ in a writing workshop, the answer is almost always no.
But it was something else, too, that question about earning. It suggested there was something I could have done to make that florid little line more palatable: I could have worked harder somewhere else, I could have put more in, I could have earned it. It’s a tantalising vision of writing as an exchange: good sentences in return for bad ones; a brilliant character in return for some clunky exposition; and, later, a good book in return for a reader’s money.
Sitting there in the workshop room—it was slightly too small for the group, so we were knee-to-knee, elbow-to-elbow; it was September but still very hot—I imagined faceless readers surveying my future novel on a bookshop shelf, waving their ten pound notes (or twenty – let’s say it was a hardback) and saying, ‘Have you earned this? Is your book good enough to deserve my hard-earned cash?’
You can’t ask the question, ‘Have you earned this?’ without asking, on some level, how much it is worth.
Several years after that writing workshop, when I’d left Boston, moved back to London and then, briefly, gone to live in a treehouse in Texas, I sold my first book and was paid some money for it by a publisher. It was my first experience of earning from my writing, and I felt I was finally allowed to call myself a writer. I felt justified in all the questionable decisions I’d made in my twenties that led up to the validation of publication. I felt, briefly, very glamorous, though the treehouse where I lived overlooked a scrubby little yard full of chickens, and my days consisted of taking the bus to and from an archive, where I sat alone and leafed through pages of almost illegible Victorian scrawl, researching for my next project. I bought a nice handbag.
When calculating expenses on my tax returns I had to make decisions about what did and did not count as work. My accountant spelled it out: it is work if it relates to your job as a writer. Buying books, then, was a reasonable expense. Travel to the Texan archive was likewise reasonable. I wanted to know whether travel to a coffee date, if I wrote about the coffee date afterwards, counted. What about a session of couple’s therapy, if I went on to describe it in a book? If I kept a diary in which I wrote down every single thing I did, with the hope of one day publishing it, would every single thing I did become tax deductible? I didn’t actually dare bother my accountant with these questions; when I mentioned it as a sort of joke she just muttered something about Ireland.
I began to understand how complicated the concept of work is, when your work is as amorphous and slippery as: going through life and then writing it down.
I knew it wasn’t going to last forever, in any case, the experience of being a writer and nothing else. I couldn’t publish at a fast-enough rate to support myself long-term, and my nerves couldn’t handle it even if I did. I needed stability, predictability; I needed a job, and the summer that my first book came out, I applied for one. It was a creative writing lecturer position at a London university; a permanent, half-time contract. It seemed to me the answer to all my questions about writing and earning: a way of doing both, productively and rewardingly, for as long as I wanted. I remember that as I was putting together an application I described the job to people, unironically, as my “dream”.
Three things happened at the job interview: I had a miscarriage; I fell in love; I got the job. About the first two: more later. About the third: it was the beginning of a stage of my life that is ongoing, in which I earn a living from writing and from teaching other people to write. It’s a life in which a question like, ‘Have you earned this?’ can take multiple forms, can be the less forthright sister of, ‘Do you deserve this?’ In both questions this is unstable, could mean: money, could mean: a bad sentence, could mean: ill treatment, could mean: good luck or bad.
On the train, on my way to teach workshops at my new job, I listened to the guard listing the names of South London overground stations and tried to figure out what I was giving when I taught, and what I was taking. Have you earned this? as in, have you put in enough effort and thought and energy to deserve this salary? But also, Have you earned this? as in, is it worth it, really, the repetitions and the polite euphemisms and the staying up late bleary-eyed marking and the feeling at the beginning of class of fight-or-flight and the feeling after class of having just been in some sort gladiatorial arena – is it worth it, for what it’s costing you?
All writing is an exchange. I say this to my students a lot. It’s outrageous, really, what writers ask of their readers: Here is my stuff. Pay for it with money and time and attention. Go to the trouble of imagining the things I’ve made up. Instead of doing literally anything else—playing with your child, walking through the woods—be here, read this. It’s audacious. Presumptuous. And if you’re going to do it, you have to interrogate everything, all the time. You have to do the work. And that’s what I want to think about in this newsletter: what that work is and how it changes us.
If you’re going to do this—to work at writing, to write—you have to offer and be offered something that makes it worthwhile. This is why beginnings are so important, I tell the students when we talk about beginnings. This is why middles are so important. This is why endings are.