leahbobet | Employment, entitlement, and the arts.

All right, kids, buckle up. I'm going to ramble a bit.

matociquala posted last night on her workweek and how long it takes her to write a book. What this post is actually about, although it comes clearer in the comments, is another aspect of the question that spurred it: The perception of authors as overpaid, spoiled, wealthy, greedy or...maybe just indulged members of our society. The perception, in short, of art as a class of work valued less than other classes of work.

I tangle with this thing a lot.

I am a working writer. No, I am not a writer who has a novel in print (and we'll get into the hobbyist perception that goes with that another time), but I am a writer who has been writing for eatin' money since early 2003 or so, which is when I started being reliably paid for stuff. Trufax: in second year I regularly paid my phone bill with the dribs and drabs of money from poetry sales. Writing still composes a non-major, but non-trivial part of my household income: My support staff and moderation gig at the OWW helps me keep chipping away at my school debt, and Shadow Unit, while not even remotely paying for the time we put into it at this juncture, kicked me enough cash last year to cover a month's worth of groceries and (non-rent) bills.

As

truepenny has pointed out this week it's very hard to make ends meet as a writer. So unlike Bear and Sarah, I am also the proud possessor of a full-time Dayjob with really solid benefits.

My Dayjob is in the public sector, which is another place with some class-of-work issues.

There was a point early last year, when I was still fairly new to the job and quite blissful about it (I have a truly great office full of truly awesome persons) where I got very upset about my inability to communicate to people outside government that I really liked my brand new job. Any enthusiasm I had about my work would be automagically translated into Well, must be nice to have it that good and not have to work hard. You're having fun? Is that my tax dollars at work? The base assumption was that because clearly all public servants are spoiled and lazy and sheltered by the hand of a government employer, the enjoyment I got out of my job must be from lying on the couch and eating bonbons instead of ~~pounding steel all day like real manly men~~ doing actual, real work. It couldn't be that I had a good boss, good co-workers, and interesting, intellectually stimulating work; it must have been that my work was not legitimate, not demanding. To this day, I quite literally cannot talk about anything fun that happens in my office -- silly water cooler stories, lunch table anecdotes, nothing -- in mixed company without getting some form of blowback. Period.

I've learned to work around and weather the thing since, but it was actually quite hurtful. I couldn't share a good thing about my life anywhere but with my most trusted friends. It was like trying to show someone a butterfly and having the thing -- and your hand -- pissed on and then set on fire.

So basically I get shafted coming and going on this one. Of the 60+ hours of work I put into an average workweek, none of it is considered valued or legitimate work outside of my various insider circles. I have one career where I have to step carefully if I want to express the most basic pride in my work, and one career where I have to step carefully if I want to utter the mildest complaint about it.

And that means I'm sort of fascinated by the psychology behind perception of work: Why and how do we decide which fields of work are more "real" than others? How have we somehow accorded legitimacy to some -- totally necessary -- functions in society and yet routinely disparage other -- totally necessary -- functions? Why do normally right-thinking people open their mouths and drop these assumptions onto the floor every day?

I think about this a lot. I tangle with it a lot.

I think it's something to do with a class of products or services that, to people without expert knowledge, seem to self-create or self-maintain; that we feel have always been there. It's to do with the nature of work where, when it's done right, the worker isn't even noticed.

Let me go into that a bit.

People get pissed off at customer service or restaurant wait service if it's obtrusive. People only notice that grocery store stockpersons exist when something's not on the shelf. People only remember the existence of the Ministry of Transportation when there's a pothole. People get pissy at subway repairs because the inherent and subtextual expectation is that while of course subways need to be fixed, the fixing of them should be invisible. We should never see it happen, or it has essentially failed.

People only notice the author in the text, like the waiter or subway repairman or stockperson, if they feel something has gone wrong.

If we do our job right, the logic goes -- and I'm not getting into whether this is right or wrong today -- the reader shouldn't even see us. One paragraph at the back of the book saying general things about our pets, maybe where we live. Standard words at the front about who made this book possible; all very much to the forms. Look at the emphasis that creates, just by inference: the important thing is the book. We, the authors, should be completely occluded, completely obscured by the text itself.

When I pull off a good story, a paragraph that crunches into someone's chest like a wrecking ball, the book's there in their vision and it's fifty feet tall, bright as noon, eating up everything and roaring like a cannonball.

I'm not.

I'm invisible.

Here's the problem with that notion of successful art -- a notion that okay, I can't really argue with. The notion of text that lives head and shoulders above its author, text that takes on a life of its own and forms a relationship with the reader that the author really has no part of is really kind of glorious. I think a lot of us crave it a bit: making something that's bigger than us.

Thing is, it gets really hard to assert the personal or financial rights of invisible people.

This is why the argument against writing fanfic of works whose authors are uncomfortable with it never gets anywhere. This is why things like arts grants, book prices, royalty statements, financial need are considered faintly distasteful topics in a lot of writing circles, or why we talk about them in lowered tones or prescreened company. This is why it's such a big deal when an author "goes nuts" and engages readers who criticize their book, their lifestyle, their looks, their person, and why that behaviour is stomped on and stigmatized so hard. This is why reactions such as that which occurred on the Kindle forum about this Amazon kerfuffle happen. To the greater reading public, authors are invisible people. We don't exist, and therefore neither do our needs.

The question becomes, then: how to create fiction that stands like a pillar of fire in someone else's brain, to not get between my fiction and its reader, and yet, keep myself firmly in existence?

That one's for you, team. I am sadly out of answers tonight.

Current Mood: pensive
Current Music: Ubiquitous Synergy Seeker -- Me vs. Us

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

dichroic.livejournal.com

I'm not sure I agree with all of that, though definitely with some. as far as the issue of dignity and status of work, there are two groups of people I think are getting conflated: the trained monkey idiots ("You get paid for writing books? A trained monkey could do that!") and those who envy authors and others who get to do the work they love. I think the latter is perfectly reasonable, when it comes with the realization that beloved work is still work - and still not easy (especially for anyone working two jobs, or three books at a time, or whatever it takes). But the latter are certainly outshouted and probably greatly outnumbered by the trained-monkey crowd.

On the second point, I was reading a great essay last night by Anne Fadiman (it's in At Large and At Small discussing two conflicting viewpoints: that the author doesn't matter and the work must speak for itself; and that the author does matter and thus e.g. Moby Dick is less valuable because Herman Melville beat his wife and was a horrible person. She argues for a middle ground, understanding what's written in context of the author and her times (not banning Huck Finn because it's anti-racist by 19th c. standards but not 21st c. standards) but also using one's own viewpoint in one's own reading experience (feeling included within the male-centric terms used in the Declaration of Independence). I probably haven't explained it well; Fadiman says it much better.

From:

leahbobet.livejournal.com

I'm not sure I agree with all of that

Agreeing with me isn't usually a requirement for hanging out here. *g*

Huh. I think I must hunt that essay up, and yeah, I am getting what you're saying. People get really...convenient about the pertinence of the author and the author's politics when it comes to evaluating or judging a work. It's everything when it suits the reader and then nothing when it suits the reader, and yes, those are both extremist black-and-white positions and every extremist black-and-white position will inevitably run into a situation when it fails utterly to serve anyone's needs anywhere.

Maybe it's just because I am an Enemy (tm) to biographical criticism, but that hop on the tracks of logic where the author can and can't be important to the reading of the work has never quite sat right with me.

This girl's life among the electrical lights

Employment, entitlement, and the arts.

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