The Emperor’s New Prose

The Nepotological Constant

Having kicked around on the periphery of professional writing for a long time, and based on my own jaundiced and highly anecdotal research, taking up writing as a profession always seemed as quaintly delusional as becoming a Cubs fan: a slowly down-sloping water-slide to perpetual heartbreak. And since being forcibly banished to the wasteland of grim labor market statistic-hood a year ago (and finding myself becalmed between my desire to change the world and the need to change my oil) I have taken another look at the exciting world of putting words in a row for money.

It seems that, for some, not only has the declivity of the path to poverty gotten sharply steeper, but someone has taken all the guardrails down.

For some, that world looks awfully bleak (Susie Bright’s terrific piece here puts a live and timely round right in that wheelhouse.)

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The writer/journalist community is the one i know best— and it's a landscape most easily compared to Flint, Michigan. Our publishing world has simply gone out of business. The few publishers still operating have a new business model: Don't. Pay. Writers.
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For some, that patient has been bleeding out for a very long time (quote pulled from this site from 1995.):

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The economics of writing have changed radically in the past few decades. It used to be that there were plenty of lucrative venues for fiction; no longer. And, of those few periodicals that publish fiction, most are non-paying "literary" reviews, often connected with a university. Formerly, it was possible to crank out enough commercial fiction (genre stories, confessions, anonymous erotica and the rest) to make a living.

This is simply not possible anymore, and the writer is forced to garner an English degree (or, more popularly these days, an MFA in Creative Writing), seek tenure and write on the side. Believe me, it shows.
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So things are bad. Very bad. Have been very bad for years and are getting worse.

For some.

Susie Bright continues:

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The handful of reporters who remain in a union-guild newspaper bringing home a paycheck have serious survivors' guilt.

It's interesting how the economic crisis hit book authors. Our "middle class" has been eliminated— not metaphorically, but literally. My freelance income has been cut 80% in the past couple years, and that's unremarkable.

There were thousands of us in the "writer-middle." We weren't always on the NYTimes bestseller list, but our books filled many hands. Book reading was ubiquitous, not an eccentric hobby. We supported our families with our writing as surely as others did by welding or waitressing. (Two of my former teenage occupations that started with 'W'). Many of us were, or are, influential— the kind of people you say of later, "They changed my life." Little did you know the movers and shakers were parsing food stamps.

Why are working writers so shy to blubber on the street about their undeserved fate?

Well, it's because our world is based on "looking good" and not appearing ungrateful.
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This is the bubble that needs to be burst. ...Look at the last issue of the New York Times Review of Books and try to guess how many of those authors will be able to pay the rent this month on their royalties. Now divide that by two. And divide again.

What about the big stars? They've been shocked as well. I've had household-name authors cry on the phone to me, grateful that I had a small three-figure licensing check for them.
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What about writers in academia, you may wonder? Well, those with tenure wander the crumbling halls, repeating, "No matter how bad it gets, I still have health insurance." Of course, that's before they see what the university had done to dilute their benefits.

The greater group of teachers have no job security and are paid less per hour than you'd get at McDonald's. That's not an exaggeration...

(Go read it all here; it is absolutely worth your attention.)

So, with journalism in open retreat on all fronts, the middle-class-income-generating mid-lists long dead (along with many of the publishers who made them possible) the days when you could bang out a living cranking out intoxicating steams of words are now over. Ergo, without some combination of an endowment, a bread-winning partner, a formidable reserve of “fuck you” Chedda, a patron, a tenured position or similarly cloistered economic garden out of which you can siphon sufficient time and energy, the brutally entropic reality of choosing the path of the writer in a culture that is fleeing the joys and responsibilities of literacy at the speed of light is borderline economic suicide.

For some.

And yet for others, the profession of writing -- in the words of a certain former Governor -- is fucking golden.

From Gawker:

Idiot Inks Boffo Book Deal

Oh, good, Jonah Goldberg just got a million dollars to write another book. Hooray for the publishing industry!
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And so we come to the real, bottom-line question: How is this possible? How can these two facts -- excellent writers starve while incompetent wingnut hacks pulls down lucrative book deals -- be reconciled within the confines of a rational Universe without causing spacetime to collapse in on itself?

Well, first, in many such cases (Bill Kristol, Chris Wallace, Tucker Carlson, etc.) you must remember to apply the Nepotological Constant (from Gawker again, with emphasis added by me):

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Jonah Goldberg—who has a career of any kind solely because his mother told Linda Tripp to secretly tape conversations with a lady who gave the president a blow job, and who is generally considered to be one of the most intellectually lazy pundits of any political persuasion of all time—writes about The Simpsons for The National Review Online.

His last book, Liberal Fascism, was based entirely on the fact that someone told the 40-year-old Goldberg that "Nazi" stood for "National Socialist" and then he basically stopped listening.

And second, you must remember that the economics of this are made possible by the fact that such “writing” is no longer even writing at all (Gawker):

[Liberal Fascism] was a number one New York Times best-seller, because a couple thousand people will buy anything that says mean things about liberals and because the conservative publishing industry buys its own product in mass quantities in order to distribute via World Net Daily donation gifts and "book clubs."

Such writing is now nothing more than a multi-level marketing scam.

Literature rendered down into HerbaLife.

Belles-lettres become Beanie Babies.

Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis turned, at last, into fucking Precious Moments Figurines.

Welcome to the giddy, oxygen-deprived last moments at the end of literacy and the beginning of the world of the Emperor’s New Prose.