Writers and Money: Living By Our Wits When Everyone Is Scared Out Of Theirs
This is the text of my speech at the UMPIL (Unyon ng mga Manunulat sa Pilipinas) Congress in August 2020. Nobody ever talks about how writers make a living, so I did.
Most of us would’ve preferred to meet in person, but this is how we assemble now. I would argue that even before the pandemic upended our lives, online was increasingly becoming the home of writers. With the onset of the digital age and the decline of print media, many of us found new employment online. And with the ridiculous road traffic that no one misses, traveling any distance to a meeting had begun to resemble a hostage situation.
I am still surprised when people say, “Sorry, I’m not a techie, I can’t access that file” and request the printed copy. We all love paper. If I had my way, I would write everything longhand on vellum and send it out by ravens. There is nothing like a book, the smell of ink and paper, the weight in your hands. But it’s the 21st century, and online is just faster, cheaper, more convenient, and now, safer. The resistance to digital technology is understandable given privacy issues, cybercrime, and the way social media has disrupted the democratic process. Like it or not, until we have mastered telepathy, we’re going to have to deal with it.
I do not believe that the resistance to technology is a function of age. I am older than many of you. I think this feeling of helplessness goes back to when people had secretaries and assistants to do their correspondence. Technology has made everything easier, but you have to do things for yourself. Also, those of us born before the 80s remember when technology was expensive and easily breakable. Not anymore. Now we learn by making mistakes. With each systems upgrade, we reset learning parameters. Groucho Marx had a bit where he said, “A five-year-old can do this. Bring me a five-year-old.” You would do well to follow that Marx.
Given the theme of this conference, I’d like to talk about something essential that is rarely discussed in the open. Writers are expected to talk about the profound philosophical issues of the day, and this topic is considered tacky and crass. However, we cannot live without it. I’d like to talk about writers and money, and the difficulty of making a living by writing, especially now that existing problems have been magnified by the pandemic. My talk is entitled Living By Our Wits When Everyone Is Scared Out Of Theirs.
In the Philippines, and in many other countries but especially the Philippines, when you tell your elders that you want to be a writer, the usual reaction is, “But there’s no money in it.” This is true, of course, and if you listened to your elders you would probably not be at this conference. My elders didn’t shut down my aspirations completely, but they approached it from an angle: “Why don’t you study law or medicine or something that will lead to a lucrative profession, and then write on the side?” Practical advice, though it doesn’t speak well of our attitude towards culture in general and literature in particular. We’re not alone in this. I’ve been told that in France, a country that is admired for the importance it places on culture, parents wish their children would become engineers, so that their children’s children can be writers and artists. Money is always a consideration.
We live in a society where poverty is rampant, and yet it is considered the worst insult to be called poor. Even when it’s a fact. I have heard otherwise nice people disparage others by saying, “Wala namang pera yan.” You can write magnificent books that change the lives of the people who read it, but if you have no money, you’re nothing. Worse, you’re a fool for dedicating your abilities to something that won’t make you rich.
At the same time there seems to be a rule that if you’re a writer, you’re already doing what you love, and so you don’t need to get paid for your writing. Consider the plight of a freelance writer. Payments for freelance articles have not changed since I started writing in the 1990s. In many cases, the rates have decreased. In many cases, you don’t get paid at all: the understanding is that having your byline appear in a publication is an ad for your services, so someone else will hire you. Many newspaper columns are public relations vehicles for the author and their clients. Sometimes you don’t get paid, for the simple reason that the publication has no money, and is somehow still running.
Say you get an assignment from an editor. The fee is P1,500 for an 800-word article. You incur expenses researching, conducting interviews, and writing that article—sometimes more than P1,500, but that’s okay because you were never in this to get rich. You submit your article. And then you have to wait until the article is published, the accounting department prepares the cheque, the cheques are signed and released, etc. You get paid at least one month later. For magazines it takes longer. How are you going to live?
Collecting your fees is another problem. It is often humiliating. You call the office of the people who owe you money, get passed around, and after you’ve repeated your request many times, with mounting embarrassment, you are told to call again. Why is it that the writer collecting their fee is the one who’s embarrassed? Shouldn’t the debtor be the embarrassed party? Collecting is an admission that you need the money. It is embarrassing to not have money, even if it’s true.
I have been a freelance writer all my life. I sold my first magazine article when I had just graduated high school, and I paid for my tuition fees at UP by freelance-writing. Marita Nuque, the editor of Woman Today magazine, gave me a regular gig writing cover stories. I interviewed a lot of artista and fashion models. At the time my ambition was to write about bands for Rolling Stone Magazine, so I wrote about aspiring actors as if they were rockstars. I got paid P150 per 1,000-word article. My tuition fee during my first semester at UP was P360.
When I got out of college, I decided to get my own apartment. I shared an apartment with two people. My share of the rent was P2,000. By that time, the magazine was paying P300 per article. So if I wrote ten articles in one month, my rent and utilities were covered. I found other freelance work. Publicists paid decent money for me to write ten versions of a press release about shampoo. I wrote copy for in-house corporate publications. I won a Palanca Award for a short story, and the prize was P10,000. Sometimes I was hired to write the copy for advertising supplements—those paid well.
Then I started writing a newspaper column. It was a small paper, but I got paid P2,000 then P3,000 per 1,000-word column. My column appeared three times a week. I wrote so many columns that I developed a counter in my brain that automatically told me to stop when I reached 1,000 words. Between the twelve columns a month and other freelance jobs, I managed to pay the bills. I never had a regular salary or benefits. I got paid by volume.
Soon I discovered that if you have a following as a writer, and you are comfortable with speaking in public, you will be offered jobs in other media. I started doing a radio talk show, then a TV talk show. These paid more than writing. I told myself that in my free time, I could write the novel I’d been threatening to write since I was in high school. This was harder than I thought. Some people can write for their day jobs, and write novels in their spare time. Turns out I need focus and momentum. I started several novels and never got past 50 pages. Some became short stories. Some were just terrible.
And then the 90s ended.
In 2000, some friends and I decided to put up a magazine. It would be a journal of current affairs and culture, and we decided to name it after a column I’d written in ’93. In the column I joked that the millions of overseas Filipino workers were our army of world domination. They were working in the houses of the powerful, raising their children and maintaining their households while their employers ran the global economy. If the OFWs went on strike, countries would stop functioning.
We started pitching Flip: The Official Guide to World Domination to investors. It was not a good time to pitch a magazine. Every other day, articles came out about the impending death of print. But we thought our concept was sufficiently different to survive the change. We asked investors to fund a monthly magazine for two years, after which we would be able to sustain operations through advertising sales and retail. We raised only a third of what we needed, but managed to keep going for one year. Flip folded in 2003.
I went back to writing columns for a bigger newspaper. The pay was the same, but we writers got a lot of foreign trips and gift certificates from sponsors, because how could we write about lifestyles without experiencing them ourselves? I had front seat tickets to the singles finals at the Australian Open of tennis. I flew business class, wore a Missoni scarf and dragged a Rimowa suitcase. But I had grown tired of writing columns. I felt that everything I had to say, I had already said. It is not a good thing to repeat yourself. And I still hadn’t finished a novel.
A couple of times I got commissions to produce books for corporate clients. These jobs pay well, but there’s lots of better-known competition. Besides, I was supposed to be “quirky” and “angsty” and therefore not a natural choice to be writing corporate books. I consoled myself that I was not considered boring enough to write for corporations, but I could’ve used that money. The cost of living kept on rising, but the pay for writing did not. I had credit card debts. Eventually I had to accept that I could not pay off my card debts if I kept using the cards and only paying the monthly minimums. The card companies hired collection agencies which made ugly threats. I cut my cards and paid off my debts.
Meanwhile, the Internet and social media were changing the ways people consumed information. Print readership was falling. Younger readers were getting their news from social media. Public discourse had grown exponentially vicious. And I still hadn’t finished a novel.
One day I realized I was pushing 50. I decided to drop everything and write a novel. It was, as they say, a leap of faith—I had no alternative sources of income. I thought that if I finished a novel, everything would be fall into place. It did, but not the way I thought it would.
When I was a kid, I thought that I would become a bestselling novelist and live off my royalties. My books sold decently, but my royalties were not enough to live on. I knew I could not go back to writing columns. Publications were cutting staff, or shutting down. I had to find another way to make a living. My friend started an online channel and was looking for original content. I started writing and hosting a talk show called The Sanity Maintenance Program. I started giving writing workshops.
Today I do the talk show, give workshops, and sell my books online and at events that I organize. I’ve looked into self-publishing, and at subscription-based platforms like Patreon. Everyone has to learn to do their own office work in the digital age, and writers have to do their own self-promotion, marketing, and sales. We don’t have literary agencies in the Philippines, we have to do everything ourselves. Yes, it seems shameful. Our work should be able to speak for itself, we shouldn’t have to sell ourselves. But it’s the 21st century and this is how we roll.
Today the pandemic is destroying the economy and our institutions. It was hard enough to make a living as a writer before the pandemic, and now I can’t imagine what’s going to happen. But we cannot stop writing. We have to keep looking for ways to live off our work. Writing is an essential service vital to the survival of humanity and it should be treated as such. I refuse to see it as a kind of martyrdom.
I like to describe the writing profession as “living by your wits”. It makes us sound raffish, disreputable, devil-may-care. But we have lived on adjectives for too long. We need money. We need respect, not the “Ang galing mo naman” kind of flattery and passive-aggressive smart-shaming, but respect as in decent pay and opportunities. The pandemic has upended the way we live, and everything must change. How will writers survive in this strange new world? I put that question to you.
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