“Jobs” you get “paid” for

July 8th, 2012 / 10:39 am Doug—

I don’t think the issue was that the job isn’t paid, but in how it was initially presented. Titling it “Need a fucking job?” implies it would be paid, because ‘jobs’ typically are. This effect is enhanced if, indeed, the reader needs a job. It is further enhanced when the admission that it is not paid does not appear until halfway down the post. Headlines are tricky.

July 8th, 2012 / 10:58 am June Ward—

Seems like in literature, especially small/independent presses/magazines/whatever, people are really into the idea of working on producing or editing things and not getting paid for it–which is totally fine and cool, but I don’t get this holier-than-thou attitude about it that is pretty ridiculous, considering how self-serving it usually is, especially compared to other volunteer work people do–building homes, medical volunteering, environmental work, public/neighborhood art, animal activism. In no other field–not even other arts fields–is unpaid working considered a “job.” The definition of a job is something you do for money. Get over yourself.

July 8th, 2012 / 11:24 am Trey—

woman who has a child and is fond of cliched sayings: “being a mother is a full-time job”

person on street: “you horrible person how can you call that a job you are not getting paid for it and that means it is not a job it is a pastime at best I hope you’re proud of yourself I wish you were dead”

July 8th, 2012 / 11:38 am Mike James—

This guy Rick always drops through at random times to drop some real talk on ya’ll bitch asses.

July 8th, 2012 / 12:31 pm shaun gannon—

my ass is not a bitch :(

July 8th, 2012 / 1:10 pm A D Jameson—

Being a mother (or a parent in general) should be recognized by the government as an actual job, and one that’s vital to society; those who do it should get paid by the government, and receive social benefits as well as free career training later when the children grow up.

My mother was a full-time mother and she did a pretty awesome job, and society has benefited from her having done that. (My sister and I turned out well and work etc.) But society, for some bizarre reason, made it very hard for her to do that, and for other parents to parent full-time.

After my sister and I grew up, my mom had no direct income of her own, no social benefits, and found it nearly impossible to reenter the workforce. That’s a shameful and ridiculous way to treat people.

July 8th, 2012 / 1:16 pm lily hoang—

Agreed, both of you. I was being cheeky with the title of the post. My error, but still, I think I had some point somewhere in here. Idk, I’m delirious.

July 8th, 2012 / 1:57 pm Michael J Seidlinger—

I have made enough money off my writing to be able to go into a bar and use royalties to get moderately buzzed this one time. I think that one time is enough though. It certainly would be cool to be making a living off editing/writing but, really, I’ll be doing what I’m doing right now with or without the occasional self-confidence boost of a royalty check every couple months/half-year. If I didn’t need to eat, sleep, or pay for gas/health insurance I’d get rid of all that too so I could write more, edit more, dream more, read more… more, more, more. There’s always “more” and in some sense it is a method of payment; there’s always more to be added to the page.

July 8th, 2012 / 2:01 pm lily hoang—

It’s ok, Adam, thank you for yr support tho. This is what the Internet does, I got me some leathery skin.

July 8th, 2012 / 2:05 pm A D Jameson—

Oh, wait, sorry; misread your comment. Apologies.

July 8th, 2012 / 2:09 pm June Ward—

Homeowner also did not post on HTMLGiant about a new “job opening” for _someone besides homeowner_ to roof his house for him.

There’s a big difference between a “job” and a, you know, handjob– if you do it yourself, no $$ is needed

July 8th, 2012 / 2:55 pm Richard Grayson—

Writing is my hobby. I have made my living as an attorney, a law school adminstrator, a computer trainer, a college and high school teacher, and (currently) a consultant for a hedge fund. It is my hobby because I couldn’t live on the money I have made from it: not the royalties from my hardcover or papeback books or ebooks, even the ones reviewed in places like The New York Times Book Review; nor the four state arts council grants I’ve gotten (they are “grants,” after all); nor the money from the articles I’ve had published (not even the $3,000 from People); nor the money I’ve made as a newspaper columnist for New Jersey Online and the Hollywood Sun-Tattler (no one could live on $100 a week, not even in 1986 or 1994), nor from the money sent to my PayPal account from HTML Giant readers who like my comments (though I am grateful, Barbara and Sean).

It is great to have writing as a hobby because you can do your hobby everywhere, it doesn’t clutter your house, and it costs less money than dressing up for Civil War re-enactments or collecting tropical fish.

I would like to see more people, including most of the college professors who teach in MFA programs, describe writing as a hobby.

http://books.google.com/books?id=Jm8rlz0wKvsC&pg=PA83&lpg=PA83&dq=richard++grayson+a+hobby+at+the+core+of+one%27s+life&source=bl&ots=nOyMs4Q3Uj&sig=vCN4wEQY59iWCfYP2XOkYlWnoQA&hl=en&sa=X&ei=hdb5T4XlDMSV6wG6j7zXBg&ved=0CFAQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=richard%20%20grayson%20a%20hobby%20at%20the%20core%20of%20one%27s%20life&f=false

July 8th, 2012 / 4:13 pm Mike James—

I survive on less than 100 dollars a week. That is not a joke.

July 8th, 2012 / 5:20 pm tyler lebens—

can anyone point the way to Happy Dog Mom?

July 8th, 2012 / 6:25 pm Anonymous—

the relative valuelessness of writing, and the arts in general, is a pretty popular idea among many writers/artists. it’s interesting that this valuation pretty closely mirrors that of most governments, school boards, and other governing bodies in the U.S. i think we might need to give up the fight for arts funding for children if, after they attend symphonies and are able to afford crayons in the classroom and have authors visit their schools, they grow up to have their artistic peers tell them it was–relatively speaking–mostly a waste of their time.

July 8th, 2012 / 9:06 pm Nick Mamatas—

I’m pretty sure the real Breece D’J Pancake (RIP) could tell the difference between writing and publishing. Indeed, nobody writes to get a gig teaching frosh comp to all those terrible horrible people who go to state schools (shock!) away from the coasts (horror!), but people do *publish* in order just to do that. If you think “publish or perish” magically doesn’t operate in academic creative writing, there’s really nothing else left to say other than that you are wrong. Of course publish or perish operates in CW, just as it does in the rest of the academy. And in the same way few kids say, “When I grow up, I’m going to publish a short story in the East Hackensack Review and get two copies as payment, and then do a novel with my friend’s press and sell 200 copies!” no kid says “When I grow up, I’m going to spend five years writing a dissertation on the child-naming practices of low-SES parents in Northern California, so I can get a job teaching Durkheim and Marx to teenagers who just want to work for Microsoft.” And yet, the world is full of people who do just those things. We’re almost all mediocrities, we all fall short of our ambitions and settle for something less, by definition.

As an aside, “marketable fields” aren’t as marketable these days as you might think, being a writer—as opposed to a professor of either literature or writing—doesn’t require having been a literature or creative writing major, and there are plenty of ways to make money or enter “the writing life” without a degree at all. (Wanna code: get devtools and start playing around. If you’re any good, you’ll get a decent job somewhere, even with only a high school diploma. Wanna write: the same thing is true. Get a library card and a cheap computer with a word processing program.)

By the way, desktop publishing in the 1980s led to its own explosion of lit journals, but the actual motivation for most of them was to publish one’s friends. The motivation to publish in most of them certainly wasn’t to be read, as the circulation of these journals was incredibly low, but to…go on, guess, have a publication credit. These days, there’s no reason at all to publish with an online zine if one wants to be read. Just Get Popular on Twitter and put the stories up on your own Tumblr. Indeed, the Internet has made it so easy to publish that one need not publish with anyone other than one’s own self. Non-self-publication is a form of credential, dubious as it is, and has little to do with why one writes.

July 8th, 2012 / 10:24 pm ZZZZZIPPP—

MIKE IF YOU MADE A BOOK ABOUT THAT ZZZZIPP WOULD READ IT AND MAYBE REVIEW IT FAVOURABLY ON AMAZON HOW CAN YOU DO THAT IF YOU AREN’T A PHOTON MAYBE WAIT ARE YOU A PHOTON OF SOME KIND

July 8th, 2012 / 11:35 pm JAGABOND—

Looking for someone to pay for my writing… pst me.

July 9th, 2012 / 1:47 am Nick Mamatas—

“Breece”, the first sentence of my response to Lily, who was asking about writing and editing and whether we did it for the love or some shit was “It’s possible to do something for love and still get paid for it.” The “something” there is writing (and editing), not publishing. Writing and publishing overlap, but you simply swapped out one (writing) for the other (publishing) and then began ranting about all the poor oppressed MFA students and people looking for tenure track jobs. Boo to the hoo; those are hardly preconditions for “the writing life.”

Why do folks on the academic track publish in journals that nobody reads, for zero pay, if not for the prestige in the field? Remember, “the writing life” isn’t an answer, because it’s easier to participate in that without submitting to the unread/non-paying journals—Tumblr is part of the writing life too, and can even lead to book deals. “Because he’s a writer”, as you have it above, says nothing about necessarily publishing in any *particular* journals. “Because he’s a writer” explains submissions and even self-publication in general (writers want to be read, one presumes) but not submissions to the journals with no payment for writers and puny circulations.

**Again, your point? How does this prove that writers publish “just” to land tenure or a job?**

My point, which is actually blindingly obvious, is that there are plenty of paying venues for writing, even in the independent press. However, those paying venues tend to be more competitive. Do you really think the average quarterly Fill In The Blank Review or fiction website has a .0001 acceptance rate? That’s delusional. So if one wants to get tenure, where does one generally submit? It is not a sheer coincidence that academic literary journals happen to match the model of journals in other scholarly fields—where publication is a requirement, publication pay non-existent or even negative (pay to submit/publish), and readership limited to other scholars—while also having almost nothing in common with popular magazines, niche publications with a non-submitting readership, or even underground fanzines. It’s a *culture.* Again, you just swapped out publishing in non-paying/no-audience journals with publishing in general. There are plenty of reasons to publish in general: what reasons are there to publish in a place that pays everyone *but* the writer and that has an audience of submitters only?

As far as the founding of lit journals, why not just go ask some of their founders? You’ll generally get the same sort of thing: we didn’t see anyone publishing the stuff we and our friends were writing, and were bored with the other journals. The excellent ones ended up getting university backing (or, occasionally, dead grandma backing.)

And indeed, quality does beat quantity, but as you know there are many more writers than there are slots available in, say, THE PARIS REVIEW. So, everyone moves down one tier. And the one further down, and one further, etc.

July 9th, 2012 / 12:39 pm Karl Taro Greenfeld—

i make my living from writing books and magazine articles, and have done so for a long time. A few years ago I began publishing in literary journals—sometimes for free, sometimes for small fees. I have found that those paying even a little usually do a better job editing and presenting the stories they are publishing. (There are exceptions, of course.) I think that is because the editor of a journal paying even a few hundred dollars for a story sees that story as having some commercial value, as opposed to artistic value, and so is more careful. (I have been occasionally astonished by how sloppy some well regarded, though non-paying, journals have been with my stories.) We are a capitalist society, and while we may be artists, our work is ultimately judged or valued in capitalist terms.
Keep in mind that I am not a teacher and receive no academic credit or tenure standing from publishing stories.

July 9th, 2012 / 1:01 pm lily hoang—

That’s because you’re a badass, Karl Taro Greenfeld. Obv.

July 9th, 2012 / 1:29 pm Michael Seidlinger—

Damn right!

July 9th, 2012 / 2:34 pm Mike James—

It’s a crazy life Zip. Real crazy. Only the strong survive.

July 9th, 2012 / 3:43 pm Karl Taro Greenfeld—

i didn’t circumnavigate the system—which I don’t think is the word you were actually looking for—I didn’t know it existed until I was old as fuck. if I had known the mfa system existed in my 20s, I would have done anything I could to get into it. i was busy writing for magazines and writing speed tribes. i wish I had an mfa. i’m thinking of lying and saying I have one.

July 9th, 2012 / 3:46 pm mimi—

hi ZZIPPZZ

July 9th, 2012 / 10:06 pm deadgod—

–and soon enough, if they’re lucky, 78-year-olds.

I still ‘like’ some things that pierced everydayness for me when I was 15–I remember Dickinson as lightning, The Idea of Order at Key West, Macbeth, juvenile physical science, philosophical obscurities, lots of lasting, deepening entelechies. (–and plenty of kiddie shit. What kind of priority would it be to treat ‘youth’ as an accusation?)

I agree: if Dierks’s tumblr throws the switch for – how many was that? “a million“?? – okay, a million 15-year-olds, then that’d be very cool.

July 10th, 2012 / 5:20 pm Nick Mamatas—

No Breece, I’m sure that they do publish a tier down–when their stories are rejected by Kenyon and they have to place them lower down in order to get that “prestigious” line on their CV. (I like how you now agree with everything I say, but still keep arguing.)

Further, I never said that prestige was a binary condition—that non-paying meant no prestige. I simply noted that as a tendency prestige, circulation, and payment are positively correlated. If you continue to, stupidly, insist that prestige is somehow this freeloating thing that isn’t related to pay and circulation, of course you’ll end up confused.

Most WD contests involve the “promotion” of stories; they do publish the occasional “Your Story” in the mag (or more often, on the website) but it’s transparently obvious that in any given issue of WD 95 to 100% of the content is instructional/hobbyist/promotional, not fiction. They spend a lot more space and time promoting their contests than they do actually publishing fiction.

July 10th, 2012 / 10:04 pm Travis Kurowski—

Sorry up front for the length of this quote, but seems relative.

“I don’t remember having explained to anyone that the Little
Review couldn’t pay for contributions. It was quite taken for granted that
since there was no money there would be no talk of renumeration. No one ever
asked me why I didn’t pay, no one ever made me feel that I was robbing the poor
artist. It was nine years later in Paris that Gertrude Stein told me I couldn’t
hope to do such a thing in Europe. Her tone was almost reproachful, although
she had always offered her manuscripts to the Little Review with the same high
disregard of payment that characterized all our contributors. She merely didn’t
consider it good principle. Well, neither do I consider it good principle for
the artist to remain unpaid—it’s a little better than for him to remain
unprinted, that’s all. Practically everything the Little Review published
during its first years was material that would have been accepted by no other
magazine in the world at the moment. Later all the art magazines wanted to
print our contributors and, besides, pay them. The contributors took the same
stand as Sherwood Anderson. If they had something we especially wanted they
gave it to us before the Dial was permitted to see it—and pay. The best
European writers and painters did the same. I can’t help feeling that Gertrude
Stein is wrong. I believe that a little review can exist in any country, at any
time—not only “before the war.” I believe that an analogous thing exists
always, somewhere; exists in any epoch of an upheaval in the arts and exists by
the same dispensations.”

—from My Thirty Years’ War, the first of Margaret Anderson’s
three-part autobiography

July 11th, 2012 / 9:57 pm Richard Thomas—

i can’t speak for everyone’s dreams, but i think a lot of writers would like to make a living writing. now what does that mean? well, most likely it’s a combination of things:

1. you will publish short stories that pay nothing, pay a few copies, pay .01, .02, .03, .04 and .05 a word, and sometimes get paid a lot more, if you are really good and really lucky. you will get exposure, which can lead to all kinds of things.

2. you will get paid for your novel(s) and that could be a decent check every quarter, from hundreds to thousands. and if you are prolific enough, maybe you have several books out, that continue to sell every year.

3. you will get paid to teach, if that’s what you want to do, and that might be a decent salary, from $40-60k a year.

4. you will receive grants (anywhere from $10-10,000+) and payment for speaking/guest lecturing (wide range of possible fees)

5. and maybe you get paid to edit—a magazine or journal or anthology(ies) which could be a quarterly royalty check as well.

BUT what you are tying to do is turn your labor or love into a paying career because it allows you the freedom to do what you love the most: write. it’s tough, but it can be done. it’s what i’m trying to do, but i still work as an art director, and have for seventeen years. but the dream is still alive. and yes, money is a part of that dream, it has to be, if you don’t want your writing to remain a hobby.

good luck all.

July 12th, 2012 / 3:53 am BreecePancake—

Who said I didn’t “support writers outside of the exclusivity of academia”? Why shouldn’t I use a famous dead writer’s name as a message board handle?

July 12th, 2012 / 11:06 am mimi—

ZZZIPPY hi
what?
think i only left you this one comment here at hg

July 12th, 2012 / 8:07 pm herocious—

Hey! Look at this. I took the summer off to handpress the new Tiny TOE Press book. I figured maybe I could cover part of my monthly duties making books. I’m making copies right now but not nearly enough orders have come in to make me feel even halfway decent. I’m eating mostly pinto beans and rice and, for a treat, cheese. This should get me through the summer, at which point school will resume and I’ll tutor math again. If anyone wants a good book that embodies the art of writing and the art of bookmaking, plz email me TinyTOEPress@gmail.com OK?

“Jobs” you get “paid” for

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