Writing for love. And money

The really valuable returns for an author are emotional, spiritual even. Though it's great when the bills get paid too

A.L.Kennedy - Tuesday 5 March 2013  guardian.co.uk

Revealing accounts ... balance sheet. Photograph: David Sillitoe for the Guardian

I began my literary career with short stories. Or rather, I began with monologues. I wrote them for myself and my friends so that we could trot off and perform in auditions without exhausting the, if I recall correctly, 12 available bits for women that were in any way kind and supportive to the would-be thespian. Once I had become a permanently resting ex-drama-and-theatre-studies student (easily done) I also became someone who sat up in bed to keep warm and made small, voice-based things which eventually became short stories. There was a lot of becoming – that often happens with the arts. And eventually, way back when there were barely Amstrads, I banged together my first anthology of short stories and a publisher actually inflicted it on a waiting world, rather than asking me to save it until after I'd managed to produce something more financially prudent like a novel, or some porn.

This was all good news. Someone trapped in a recession with an odd skill set had discovered a way to be useful and, indeed, fulfilled. Given that short stories are so horrifyingly demanding technically, the anthology was an opportunity to give my prose its initial experience of proper training. I had earned myself a chance to take my voice to its next level. I won some prizes. My work came to the attention of the wider literary scene and was able to shamble further forwards and discover some more opportunities. The first novel was treated gently and coddled probably more than it deserved to be. This wouldn't happen now. The short story anthology as a first book is rarer than unicorn pie. (May contain traces of horse.) The hope of making even 50% of your income as a published author any more in the UK has probably also gone – unless you are lucky enough to produce a bestseller, preferably involving porn. This may change when UK publishers discover that the production of ebooks reduces overheads as well as cover prices. Who knows – it does tend to take a while for UK publishers to notice most things. I worry in case, for example, their offices catch fire and they all burn to death over a period of weeks, coming and going, sadly unable to realise that their coffees are boiling away to nothing in their melting cups. And this is, of course, a hard time for all industries, from the sprightly to the moribund.


So why do it? To be rather more specific, why do we write? Why do we choose to work in forms like the short story, the literary novel, the essay, the sonnet – forms which have very little commercial value? It's easier to say why we don't write. It can be really very easy to say we don't write for money and, of course, I hope we don't. We produce writing, we produce art, because we love to, because it feels good, because we can't help it, because it rewards us in a self-perpetuating cycle with varieties of emotional and even spiritual contentment. The money we earn is what we use to have more time to do what we love to the best of our ability. And we have bills and possibly loved ones who depend upon us for food, clothes, floorboards, bus fares – money is handy for that stuff, too.

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