Is it possible to make money writing anything?
Television, Books, Plays, Ransom Notes
“Biggest” News in Books: The (TV) Writer’s Strike
This week the entire television and film industry shut down as the WGA (the Writer’s Guild of America) went on strike to negotiate new salaries with the studios. While this is a very serious issue about how to divide the money pie in entertainment, writers are the absolute best and they have made the whole thing a lot of fun to follow.
They are constantly dunking on the notion that the current arrangement is anywhere near fair:
While also creating the best protest signs in the history of wage strikes.
This one is an inside joke inspired by the very funny movie theaters have the power to change lives commercial that Nicole Kidman did
I have been guilty of saying that we lose many of our novelists and book writers to our big brother of writing, TV and film. It still remains true to a certain extent that tv/film writers, of all writers—novelists, playwrights, poets, journalists—make a somewhat livable wage. What’s being exposed is that, slowly, as with all writing professions—and many jobs writ large—the reliability of that decent income is out of whack with the contribution being made. Even as the value of the end product goes up, the wages are staying flat (really going down considering inflation and cost of living; on top of this the working conditions are getting more miserable). This New Yorker article summarizes the situation well. And yet writing is the foundation of everything that TV and film is—there’s a reason everything shuts down without the writers.
TV/film is really the last line of defense for making a living as a professional creative writer, as in other arenas for writers it gets even worse. As the WGA strike unfolded, an amazing old article surfaced about playwrighting and how it devolved from a profession into a hobby. This phenomenon has happened to virtually every writing profession: it starts as a leisure profession for the already wealthy, moves to a highly profitable, glamorous job, and then in its final Frankenstein stage becomes the worst of all worlds: a job you work doggedly, in return for a leisure wage and a patina of glamour. For book publishing, we’re somewhere in between the worst of it and the best of it. For most writers, book and related freelance writing money can’t support a decent standard of living—it’s a nice bonus or side business, but, for those who really go for it, it’s a life largely lived on the margins.
There is sometimes infighting in the creative world about who should and shouldn’t get to complain (“Yes, but we have it worse!”), we pit TV/film money vs. book / journalism money or novelist vs. poet money or debut novelist vs. mid-career novelist. I vividly recall this coming up with a novel getting called out for its sizable advance—something like $600,000 dollars—and the literary agent breaking down how little that mega-advance novelist’s payday amounted to. The book was The Art of Feilding by Chad Harbach (I haven’t read it, but I have been told by multiple people it’s their favorite book), and it took the writer around ten years from conception and writing the book to selling it. Keep in mind that this is advance is at the very, very top end for novelists. A book advance is typically paid out over four years, so for The Art of Fielding (again, these figures are not exact), that’s $150,000 a year, minus an agent’s commission (15%, it’s worth it trust me) that’s $127,500 before taxes. The two kickers here involve time and risk—that $127,500 income is great but it’s only guaranteed for four years with no assurance the next book will sell for as much and it took him ten years to write this book. If you do the same calculation given the 10 year labor, he earned $51,000 pretax per year, which puts you in the middle of income distribution in the United States. And I’ve thrown a lot of numbers at you, so we won’t even get into the time value of money or inflation. Twelve years later Chad Harbach hasn’t sold or published another novel.
You can picture a similar calculation happening with television and film. Making $100,000 a year might sound like a lot for a television writer, but when you factor in the unpredictability of getting staffed on a show and the probability that show is successful, and the cost of living in Los Angeles, then it is not quite the risk/reward proposition that seems on the surface. So, all writers can hope that the WGA comes out on top and there’s at least one oasis left to make a decent wage for something that adds a tremendous amount of meaning and enjoyment to everybody’s lives.
Though it is Elmore Leonard, novelist and screenwriter, who wrote it best:
“I once asked this literary agent, uh, what kind of writing paid the best... he said, ‘Ransom notes.’”
A Page at a Time: Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, or The Reading of a Daunting Classic
Progress: Days 97, Pages 483
How many maritime plot devices are there?
As the Pequod encounters its fourth or fifth ship out to sea and has a bit of a Gam with them, it’s a time to ponder the plot of Moby-Dick, or really the fact that very little of this classic novel is plot driven. And of the “plot” chapters, the majority of them have involved Ahab’s crew randomly bumping into other ships in the open ocean. Melville isn’t entirely to blame here, there are approximately four plot points that can happen on a boat. One of them he has well covered as discussed—random encounters. The other two as far as I can put together are mutiny and acts of God. If you’ve been following closely a story of mutiny was related via Gam many pages ago, which leaves only one plot point left and my only prediction for these final 100 pages: we will see a massive storm rock the Pequod in the final push to find Moby. Maybe you caught on, that’s three plot devices not four, the last thing that can happen on a boat is that it hits dry land—the only thing that can fix the fact that there’s nothing that can happen on a boat is to get off the boat.