Last month, when my little sister got married, I got to see a family friend whom I hadn’t seen since 2010. At that time, I had written my first novel, and gotten an agent, but the book hadn’t sold yet.
This friend remembered saying to my mom, “Aren’t you scared? For Leigh to become a writer? How will she support herself?”
When she told me this, I laughed and said, “But I’ve always worked!”
The novel I wrote while I was waiting tables finally sold to an independent publisher for a $2,000 advance.
It’s completely understandable why an adult would express anxiety or worry about the future of a younger adult who says she wants to become a writer or an artist. The arts do not have a reputation as a renumerative field. We associate the artist’s life with debt, rejection, mental illness, and tuberculosis.
Meanwhile, adult writers are consistently surprised that they are unable to make a full-time living from their art.
How can this be?
One thirty-one-year-old novelist recently told The Guardian:
My friends are civil servants and doctors; they have pensions and maternity pay. I am pursuing a profession I feel passionately about and is held in high esteem. It’s very cool when you go to a party and say ‘I’m a novelist’. But actually it’s not very cool to be financially rewarded as if it’s a hobby.
I’m genuinely curious where writers are getting the idea that they will be able to support themselves by writing literary novels.