A thing to add to this discourse: in most of the entertainment industry, "Don't quit your dayjob!" is meant to disparage the talent of the individual, saying "You don't have what it takes to make it in a competitive industry."
By that measure, most professional writers suck.
By that measure, most professional writers suck.
The companion advice of "marry someone who works for a living" is also increasingly obsolete as it's increasingly difficult for one person to support a family with their income.
There's something deeply wrong with the structure of the industry and indeed society when we have a medium of entertainment that would most assuredly be missed if it disappeared but which, by and large, the people providing it can't afford to do so.
And you might be thinking, "Oh, well. The free market has spoken. If there's not enough demand for fiction to pay all the fiction writers, there are too many of them and we wouldn't actually miss them if most of them left."
But consider: the health insurance industry.
But consider: the health insurance industry.
The health insurance industry takes a lot of our money and provides no actual good, no entertainment value, no service. It's a giant layer of inefficiency between us and healthcare. What it mainly produces is profits for itself.
And yet we're called to save those jobs.
And yet we're called to save those jobs.
As with so many things, it's a question of priorities we have as a society. If healthcare were being handled as a public good and not a for-profit venture that everybody needs and that our society as a whole couldn't do without, that alone would make writing more viable a living!
If we didn't need to pay for both health insurance and then again for healthcare at the point of service, a bare bones income would be a meager income, a meager income would be a modest income, a modest income would be a living income, and so on.
The fact that the entire consumer class would have more money for luxuries with that one giant cash-sucking necessity taken care of would also mean there's more money to spend on books and zines and author Patreons.
Each improvement to the social safety net would have a similar ripple effect, making writing a more secure livelihood even if it continues to pay exactly the same, and also meaning more money could be spent on it.,
I know we're all tired of Harry Potter being the go-to for metaphors about social justice, but in this case it's not a metaphor.
It couldn't have been written without public benefits.
It couldn't have been written without public benefits.
Imagine the state of cinema and theater without Orson Welles... whose art, along with Arthur Miller and many others, was publicly funded by the Federal Theater Project during the Great Depression.
We wouldn't all be as rich as Jowling Kowling Rowling or as famous as Orson Welles with more public spending on the arts and a robust social contract, but careers would be *enabled*.
A lot of writers would still have day jobs (or side hustles that aren't quite jobs, as I do) even if we had a greater society. There's value for many in getting out of the house, in having a structure like a job, the social interaction, etc. But we'd have more control over terms.
The free market is less free the more unbalanced it is and the employment market in the US is heavily weighted in favor of employers. Employees are held hostage by things like geography and biological necessity. We "negotiate" mostly as individual ants against titans.
Many factors, including especially access to even overpriced and inferior healthcare, weigh heavily against action except taking what jobs we can get, when we can get them, and then working through sickness and injury on schedules that are in many cases inconvenient by design.
I think everybody has a story or knows multiple stories of people who accepted jobs on the promise of working around class schedules, other jobs' schedules, or childcare schedules only to be immediately jerked around, to establish This Job takes precedence and we have no power.
Where's the free market in that? What's free about that? A company can tell us to take a hike and overwork those who are left, knowing that we and they both need the healthcare (if we get it) and the food and rent money. A free market requires freedom on both sides.
This thread is getting to be more wide-ranging than I'd intended but the basic point is: the people who make the entertainment that society depends on (yes, depends on) are by and large overworked and underpaid and it's not something we can Work Smarter out of as individuals.
And literally anything we do to improve work conditions, to improve wages, to improve healthcare... will improve this situation, in ways that are small and obvious and large and indirect.
I'm going to close this thread because I'm currently at the coffee shop and supposed to be writing a story that I will then have to figure out how to monetize. If you get something out of my writing (on Twitter or elsewhere), feel free to tip.
paypal.me/alexandraerin
paypal.me/alexandraerin
