LitHub starts on a six-part series in collaboration with Dirt about “The Myth of the Middle Class Writer”. Part One is by Alissa Quart, and can be found here. For other installments go to this link.

We all know that it is actually possible to live on your writing alone. Some writers, the bestselling authors, presumably live pretty well. Lots of others get by, but the vast majority, we believe, make very little from their writing. Any making anything are working extremely hard. I find it difficult to see why we should be surprised about this. Writing books is not a job. You don’t get a salary, a pension, and health benefits. In a way it’s not essentially different from seeking to make a living as a professional gambler: you may become fabulously wealthy, though the odds are stacked against you! Can there be anyone who has set their course on making a living from writing who is not aware of this problem? OK, let’s give it a go you may decide, but when your poems, novel, essays etc. fail to earn you enough to cover your rent, you surely should not be too surprised.

Still, lots of people have been drawn to the attractive (idea of the) life-style of a writer. Signing on to a course of study in creative writing may be thought of as carrying a sort of “job-training” vibe. Ms Quart tells us that the number of creative writing programs has increased from 79 in 1975, to a recent count of 602 undergraduate and 247 postgraduate programs. Now I’ve no idea what sort of story teachers of creative writing are telling their students, but it’s hardly likely to be discouraging.

The “job” of writer has never been an easy one. Looking back into history we tend to remember the successful writers, the ones who wrote books generally held to be worth reading still, and of course they all seemed to have done OK, didn’t they? We forget about all of their contemporaries who never sold worth a damn. All we see is Charles Dickens building a big smart house at Gad’s Hill Place, in Kent. Yet Ms Quart tells us “‘doing what you love’ was more achievable in previous eras — at least for some slices of the population — when writing was a job and compensated accordingly.” Wisely perhaps she refrains from telling us where these “previous eras” are to be discovered.

Actually, within that sentence she has the qualification which answers her bewilderment. Affording a decent life-style as a writer has indeed always been possible “for some slices of the population”. Go back to medieval or early modern times, and the slices of the population she envisages would have included members of the aristocracy, and members of the church — people the cost of whose lodging and food would be taken care of for them. Later we move to a world where smart young men (by and large all of them would be men) might find a wealthy patron who would support them while they did their research and writing. We may then notice a surge of novels written by ladies; Mrs This and Mrs That: no doubt Mr This and Mr That, stolid Victorians to a man, were taking responsibility for some of the annual household budget (oh, all right, all of the annual household budget). That many lady authors became financially very successful (see for instance Romolan royalties) should not be allowed to obscure the view. Grub Street was real: you either pandered to the public or starved. In illustration I quote myself: “George Gissing, who explored this tension between the meretricious and the meritorious in his great (and serious) novel New Grub Street (1891), was himself such a self-destructive pessimist that the opportunist Jasper Milvain naturally ends up with the girl and the gelt. The impoverished serious writer Edwin Reardon, in the shape of Gissing, is of course still being read a century later.”

Perhaps what Ms Quart is really thinking is that it ought to be possible to conduct a middle-class life-style while being a writer — in other words that writing should be better rewarded. I doubt if many think that authors should be employed, at good wages, by the government. But maybe royalties aren’t high enough. Just pay authors more, and there you are. This sounds like an unanswerable argument until we have to face the consequences. There’s just not enough money in a book for everyone to be well off — perhaps we could all accept that books should cost two or three times as much as they do now, but it’s difficult to see how such a movement might get started. I had a go at this a couple of weeks ago in the context of publishing wages.

In the end we may perhaps reflect that all authors are almost by definition middle class. Authorship is after all not manual labor. Authors don’t have to be born into the middle classes, but it is unusual, shall we say, for an author to spend a full shift down the mine and come home to pen a great novel by candlelight. The problem comes not with the class bit; the problem is the earnings bit. A middle-class life lived on poverty-level pay, must be just as bleak as poverty tout court. If you went in for writing (or books, either publishing or selling them) because you wanted to be wealthy — well I’m afraid you’ve probably made a mistake.