A Patchwork Approach to the Writing Life
May 29th, 2008 by Patricia
Admitting that I wanted to be a writer took me twenty-five years. I thought, at the time, that giving myself permission to be a writer was the hard part and that actually becoming a successful writer would be easy by comparison. I knew I was a good writer. Hadn’t my teachers always told me so? Didn’t my kids love the bedtime stories I made up for them? I had an entrepreneurial spirit and a good work ethic. Surely, in a year or two at the outside, I’d be making a decent living as a writer, right? Well, sort of. It’s been more like ten years, and I still depend on my husband’s income for the basics while my income is still in the “providing frills” category. I’m not, by any means, the only hopeful writer out there and the odds aren’t exactly stacked in our favors, even those of us who have, at least, managed to break into print. The sobering fact is that only about 3% of all published writers actually make a living at it. On the other hand, not all the writers who are published want or plan to make a career of it. Some are academicians who still have to “publish or perish.” Many are people who like their day jobs and see writing as a sideline rather than a career. There are about, so I’ve heard, 200,000 new books published every year, and easily a million stories and articles. So that means there are probably at least 24,000 writers who make a living at it. Of those, only maybe 1% join the ranks of the top earners: the J.K. Rowlings and Stephen Kings. But that’s okay by me. I’m not interested in stardom–a state that seems to me to be highly overrated. I’ll settle for being one of the 24,000 who make enough money writing to pay the mortgage and put beans on the table.
Actually, as you can see by my website, I use the term “writing” a bit loosely. I figure anything that is somehow related to having a writing life, such as making author visits to schools, teaching writing others, helping put together writing conferences and reading my books at bookstores and libraries and anywhere else I’m asked to do so comes under the writing umbrella. I call this my patchwork approach to having a writing life. Anybody who has made a patchwork quilt knows that you don’t just throw a bunch of fabric scraps together haphazardly. You have to sift through what’s in the rag bag, choose a theme and a pattern, cut the pieces and fit them together carefully if you want a quilt that is not only warm but aesthetically pleasing. I’m doing my best to choose and patch carefully so that my writing life is not only economically doable, but, hopefully, something of a work of art.
I have learned a great deal about patchwork living from my neighbors. We all live in a small, rural community in one of the poorer counties in Western Colorado. Jobs are scarce around here and generally poor paying. Entrepreneurs, therefore, abound and have come up with some interesting juxtapositions in their quest to make a buck. The local movie theater is also our venue for live concerts and other community events. The video store sells lingerie in the back room. A local gallery offers everything from batik clothing to painted furniture to farm-fresh eggs and hosts a farmers’ market in their side-yard in the summer. One of our local grocery stores specializes in selling local products to the summer tourists and also has a meat processing plant in the back that does a brisk business during hunting season.
I need to get on with my patching, for now. Next time, I’ll write about what my personal “income quilt” looks like.
P.S. If you like quilts, Click here for more quilt photos.
