Robert J. Sawyer frets that the full-time scifi novelist will be extinct in a decade. Why? Book sales, those internets, etc. There’s a funny moment where he blames the death of Flashforward (the TV series based on his book) on people downloading it and not on the series being terrible, maligned by critics, detested by viewers. I guess he can’t really say that sort of thing. Then he says that really ambitious, complex works like Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy can’t really be done on a part-time basis. Maybe, maybe not. There are numerous examples of people who believe so much in the power or worth of their projects that they bring them to fruition under the most adverse circumstances. (Then he mentions his WWW trilogy in the same breath as KSR’s majestic Mars trilogy, which, sorry, no.)

Then Scalzi rebuts that Sawyer’s only fretting about a very small percentage of writers. Only a very few, regardless of genre, regardless of point in time, have made a living at writing. Huh. Now that I think about it, wasn’t Poe the first person to make a living from his writing? That would mean that Austen, Defoe, Milton wrote part-time, or as a hobby. Melville wrote everything in the second half of his career while working in a customs office. T.S. Eliot wrote The Waste Land while working in a frikking bank. Dostoevsky wrote The Brothers Karamazov under the most penurious poverty. It seems that if you have inspiration and passion, then you will make it happen. Perhaps Sawyer is worried because he doesn’t have the inspiration or passion to keep writing if he can’t do it full-time.

(Well. That’s not exactly fair - after all, he made it to the big time, back in the 80s. He had to have been  struggling writer once, working on his lunch breaks or whatever. Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt.)

Continuing on this tangent, there are plenty of writers who claimed that they wrote only for money and would quit if they had enough, or couldn’t make any more - Jack London, for one. To myself, and most writers I think, writing is a thing we do because we like to do it, and we’d do it anyway. There’s a lovely Gillian Welch song, “Everything is Free”, which seems like a reaction to file sharing - “Everything is free now/ that’s what they say/ everything we’ve ever done/ they’re gonna give it away”. Then, “I can get a tip jar/ gas up the car/ maybe make a little change/ down at the bar/ because we’re gonna do it anyway/ even if it doesn’t pay.” Yesssss, thinks I. It’s a simple affirmation of her love for her art form.

Cultures do require excess wealth to produce art, but perhaps we overestimate the amount of excess wealth required. It’s not essential, for example, to have an elite of full-time novelists pushing our prose forward. Primitive hunter-gatherers living at a subsistence level had their cave paintings and their oral traditions. It’s the human impulse to create, to make narratives as a tool for understanding the world or enlivening our experience here, and I’m not at all worried that impulse will go away; simply that the model of a few full-time novelists (representing the very top stratum of novelists, each one resting on top of a hundred dayjobbers) can’t survive. That doesn’t bother me. No mistake: I would love to be a full-time novelist. It’s the one thing I’m good at, the one thing I want to do. But I don’t expect it, and I won’t be devastated if it doesn’t come to pass. I like to think I know better than to build my life plans around the whims of indifferent, overwhelmed New York editors and indifferent, overwhelmed audiences. Maybe Sawyer doesn’t realize this because he’s been a pro for so long, but the traditional publishing model is broken, broken, broken, and it must change to survive; or maybe he does realize this, and he’s worried because he doubts his ability to change with it.

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