There are many problems with writing for a living, the most obvious being that it’s a lousy way to make a living. You not only have an endless need to justify to others why you are not only caging a free meal from them as a prelude ot asking for a loan, you have the equally difficult task of explaining why you think the projects you are currently working on have a good chance of making you as solvent as, say, a 711 store clerk.
Well, whatever the state of the economy, the meal caging and loan requests will continue as usual. A writer is a writer, after all. But thanks to the current horrific recession, even writers now have a plausible seeming excuse for not making an honest living.
Why aren’t my book propsals being picked up these days? It’s the fault of the publishing industry, of course, they just aren’t contracting for new books. Why is my screenplay project not attracting bids? Hollywood, suffering from a sharp fall off in DVD sales, just isn’t optioning screenplays the way it once did. My fall off in freelance sales to magazines? Less ad revenues in these publications means less work for freelancers. And when it comes to my poetry, of course, there’s never a need to explain why no one is paying me for that.
For artists of every kind, while recessions may be personal financial disasters, they often prove a psychological boom. In my own case, none of my more respectable friends is doing better than me these days, and indeed, better than me pretty much ever. Virtually every career choice, with the exception of working for Goldman Sachs, has proven to be a mistake. So there’s no longer a reason to be embarrassed about my own.
Thank goodness for the occasional career leveling recession. And if artists of all kinds are lucky enough to survive until another Great Depression arrives, we might actually get some steady paid work with s new WPA.