Writing Business by Catherine Czerkawska
I can dimly remember a time when – as a young arts graduate, struggling to make a career as a playwright, and then as a novelist – I might have welcomed the opportunity to study creative writing at postgraduate level. I can still see the attraction. No such courses were available back then and instead, I did a Masters in something called Folk Life Studies – hardly more useful in terms of employment opportunities, although it has certainly helped with background research for plays and fiction over the years. Not that I'm a believer in all university courses being focused on employment. Quite the opposite, really. I'm a great believer in the general first degree, whether it's arts or maths and science related. How can you know what you want to do until you know what the possibilities are?
But these were being punted as vocational courses, probably because of the current political fashion for discounting learning for its own sake. And you know what was almost totally absent from them? In almost none of these writing courses could I find the acknowledgement (or even the awareness and perhaps that’s the heart of the problem) that somebody contemplating a career as a novelist, poet or playwright might need a good working knowledge of how to start up and run a small business.
If you want to write wholly for love, then good for you. There is a part of me that writes mostly for the love of what I do. But here’s the problem. If – as an academic institution - you’re going to run creative writing courses costing many thousands of pounds, then you should at least be prepared to tell your students that they have about as much chance of making the minimum wage, let alone a living wage by ‘being published’ as they would if they bought a couple of lottery tickets every week for the next three years. Even now with all the self publishing opportunities on offer, the odds are stacked against them until they have amassed a reasonable body of work. And that could take a while.
So why not teach your students about writing as a business as well? Alongside the modules devoted to the craft of writing, give them the tools to decide which of their skills they might be able to monetise and which they might want to practise for love alone. Point out that if the balance of their creative work lies in the ‘love alone’ category, they are going to have to find another way to pay the bills. No shame in that. The real shame lies in pretending otherwise.
Above all, teach them about being self employed, keeping receipts and filing tax returns. Tell them what they can claim as legitimate business expenses and what they can’t.
Insist that they learn about cash flow and the need to cost out their time properly. About the harsh truth that turnover isn’t the same thing as profit. About the fact that if, as a self employed freelance, they do a freebie for somebody that involves being away from their desk for a day or two, they are actually losing money in a way that nobody on salary ever will be by dedicating a couple of days of their genuinely free time to some favourite project.
They will need to know about National Insurance contributions, and pensions and if and when to employ an accountant. They need to know about setting up a small business bank account, making a business plan and bank loans for micro businesses. And sources of funding for various projects and how to apply for them.
They need to know not just how to find an agent, but to decide whether they really need an agent who may be London based and pretty much uninterested in the kind of small publishing company which might be a good fit for a writer who wants to be published rather than to self-publish, or who wants to juggle the two as a ‘hybrid writer.’
They need to discuss whether they might be better not using an agent at all (and certainly not wasting years of their lives looking for one) and what the alternatives are. They need to know a bit about copyright law in the UK and elsewhere, about plagiarism and piracy and balancing the need to be wary with the need to be totally realistic about both. They need to know about real options for self publishing and new forms of vanity publishing and the difference between the two. About commissioning an editor and a cover artist and where the sources of information for such things are. And identifying and building a brand, and managing their promotion and publicity. Especially about managing their promotion and publicity which they’ll be expected to do to a greater or lesser extent, even if they are published in the traditional way.
If they really don’t want to go down the self publishing route, and even if they are among the lucky few who get an agent and a book deal right away, they still (and possibly even more vitally) need to realise that they are going to be self employed, and therefore running a small business and they need to have some knowledge of what that entails.
I found courses offering just this aspect of managing a small creative business, but very few of them were creative writing courses. They were all to do with web development, video games, music, digital art and design. They were well aware of the need for a modicum of business sense in a changing creative environment and saw no shame in it, saw no shame in advising students that they might have to learn to manage their work and their time to suit themselves. I began to wonder if it was because the people running these courses had business experience, whereas the people teaching creative writing – many of them undoubtedly fine writers - had so often come through the traditional literary publishing route and saw it as somehow shameful to consider business and literature in the same breath.
Even when you write for love, there comes a time when you have to take business decisions – many of them involving the need to manage your time and the remuneration for that time. You can try paying your central heating bills with fine literary intentions, but I’ve a feeling you might run into trouble.
It may be that with a little business sense it would be a whole lot easier for writers to organise their working lives so that they have the best of both worlds. It isn’t even as simple as the ‘write for love, publish for money’ dictum. It’s more complicated than that. These days, it may involve some combination of writing for love and for money, publishing in various ways and collaborating where you choose to collaborate. Or not, where it’s better to go it alone.There are no hard and fast rules. But there is plenty of information, and its what our students need. I just wonder how many of them are getting it?
Catherine Czerkawska
www.wordarts.co.uk
http://wordarts.blogspot.com
Comments
I don't think I'd have been rash enough to opt for a creative writing degree even in those long-lost days of free tuition AND student grants for living costs. Even in a comparative utopia, I was at heart a realist.
I learned the hard way - starting at 18 - about self-employed NI payments, 'Small Claims Exemption', Accounts, tax returns - and about how very, very little help you're entitled to as a self-employed small business proprietor, even if you've paid a lot in tax during the good years.
I'm not at all sure that 'creative writing' can be taught, but a solid grounding in running a small business certainly can, and would be incredibly useful.
;-)
Link: http://www.newcriterion.com/articleprint.cfm/Heavy-sentences-7053
Not every form of learning should be viewed as a means to financial gain.
But the fact is that most of the people going through these creative writing MAs are only going on to teach creative writing themselves - it's a self-perpetuating cycle. I became disillusioned with the whole process during the years I taught it in universities. I'm with Bill on this one.
I do absolutely agree that they should have a few sessions on the reality of the job and not have their dreams of big advances and film deals unrealistically sustained, though.