In The London Guardian nine successful literary authors tackle the subject of writing and money. This is much more insightful and interesting than it sounds. AL Kennedy starts, “The joy of writing for a living is that you get to do it all the time. The misery is that you have to, whether you’re in the mood or not.” I’m particularly fond of this quote from Joyce Carol Oates:

Given that the act of writing provokes such misery, why do you do it? – here is the writer’s perennial riddle. Every writer is asked this question, or its artful variants, and every writer comes up with some plausible answer, the most arresting of which would seem to have been Flannery O’Connor’s: “Because I’m good at it.” It’s rare that a writer – a literary writer, that is, like Colm Tóibín – will acknowledge that he writes for money, since most literary writers obviously don’t write for money – a prose fiction writer’s hourly wage, broken down into units, would be in the modest range of the US minimum wage of the 1950s – approximately $1 per hour.

And when Colm Tóibín began writing, he could have had no idea that he’d ever be paid, or even published; obviously, the motive for the form of artful mimicry we call prose fiction goes much deeper, and is inaccessible to interviewers.

Read the whole article. (via Kottke)

See also: Random Media Notes

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