Making Ends Meet : V
By AN AUTHOR pROFESSIONAL writers fall into three main groups. First, there are the fortunate few whose books sell so widely that they can take their own time about writing them, and do not need to undertake any work. other than that which arises from the production of these books. Next, there comes a very much larger class, whose members cannot depend on any one source of income. Their books sell moderately well, but they are obliged to accept a good deal of other work, and so must often interrupt a long job in order to to such profitable, short- term work as comes their way. The third, and much the largest, class consists of writers who are glad of any work they can get at any time. The majority of these, and a good many in the second class, have a subsidiary, bread-and-butter job, and practise writing side by side with it.
All writers suffer from fluctuations in their income. Those in the second class, to . which the writer of this article belongs, encounter the greatest difficulty from these fluctuations. Writing, whether or no they have a subsidiary occupation, is their prin- cipal means of earning a living. They have a home, and probably a family dependent on what they earn with their pen. Now a writer may be offered a long-term contract on very agreeable terms, carrying a substantial advance when the manuscript is completed. That money, however, is a year or eighteen months ahead of him, and in the meantime he has to pay his rent, his grocer and the fees for his children's school. Therefore he must get a good deal of short-term work, articles, short stories, broad- casts, reviewing, to keep him going until the guaranteed sum falls due. This is always his problem—to do enough short work to pay the bills without losing the thread of his novel, biography or lay. The alternative is to live on an overdraft, or a series of verdrafts, which never get quite paid off ; a policy which is bad for his nervous system, even if his bank-will countenance it. 1 These difficulties, which have always been incidental to the :writer's profession, are much aggravated today. The cost of living has risen disastrously, whereas the writer's rate of pay has of risen at all, and is even threatened on various sides. Shortage of paper means a severe shrinkage in the market for occasional ork, and a difficulty in getting work published which does not ' how the publisher an obvious and a quick profit. Moreover, he cost of producing a book has risen so steeply that publishers, fraid of raising the price of books too far, have in certain cases ' sked authors to accept a lower rate of royalty. The position or young people who want to write for a living is worse than it has been within living memory, and many older authors are hard put to it to get along. ., . A further and unnecessary difficulty is the way in which Income-tax is levied upon a writer's earnings. As everyone knows, ordinary income-tax is payable in the financial year after the one in which the income was earned and surtax two years after. Suppose that a writer suddenly has a stroke of luck. A book of his is chosen by a book society o; he sells the film rights of a story. At all events, suddenly his income is doubled or trebled. The Inland Revenue authorities treat that sudden Windfall, not as a windfall, but as part of his ordinary income for that year. In the year that follows. when his earnings fall to their usual level, or even drop below it, he has to pay tax on' the previous year's earnings, and surtax a year after that. He is not allowed to strike an average on his earnings over a period of years. however short. Thus a success which may be, so to speak,, the compound interest on twenty years of developing craftsman- ship loses most of its reward, and can even become a liability, Such a gain, even if it were not treated as capital appreciation, could at least be averaged and spread over a number of years, so. that the writer could draw a reasonable-benefit from it.
To set against all these drawbacks, the writer has one advan- tage which is denied to people with fixed incomes. Faced with a sudden demand, he can at least try to earn the money with which to meet it. Knowing that he must find school fees by a certain date, he can turn one of his short stories into a radio play and cover the bill. Having decided in April to take his wife to the seaside for a fortnight in August, he has several months in which to exert himself and earn the necessary money. The trouble is that he has to earn so much more than the cost of the holiday. It is safe to say, to take another example, that to send a son or daughter to one of the older universities involves earning five or six hundred a year for this alone.
Professional writers are an adaptable tribe, and not too many, tears need be shed over their tribulations in having to regulate their work by .the amount of money they need to earn. The big bugs of the profession, as we have seen above, do not need to worry about this. They write .a novel every year or every two years. It .is published on both sides of the Atlantic. PrObably it is filmed. It earns them as much as anyone may nowadays keep out of his income, and they need, do nothing further. The rest are obliged to accept work because it is profitable, and do it by the date demanded. The least well-off are obliged to scratch around for any work they can get. Few, except the afore- mentioned big bugs, dare write anything which they will not be able to sell.
This last is perhaps the only really serious privation. It may not only hamper the writer ; it may deprive the world of valuable work. I overheard the other day friends asking a writer, who in middle age had just produced a successful slay, why on earth he had waited so long. He replied : " Until now, I have never been able to afford to write anything on spec. If I wrote a novel, I knew I could sell it. No one can say that about a play."
And, mind you, he was lucky. In a time of stringency he had been able to afford at last the luxury of writing something which he wanted to write for other than economic reasons. What was more, it had been a success. Very few writers today are in a position to do what he did. I have been a professional writer for a good many years, and there has never been a time when I could with less certainty forecast my income for the next twelve months than today. What it will be I have -no idea.
Even so I would not change my profession for any other. Hitherto, while I have had to do a good deal of work which was not of primary interest to me, which I wianld not have done had I not been well paid to do it, I have never been obliged or tempted to write anything dishonestly, with my tongue in my cheek. I have had the singular good fortune of being able to write what I wanted to write, and being able to sell it. If I am commissioned to write an article, even though I should not have written it without that most satisfactory form of prompting, I can still do my best at it, and say what I believe. Not all writers are in that happy position.
The writer's difficulties will be sensibly relieved if and when more paper comes on the market, and both publishers and editors can be more hospitable to manuscripts. They could be relieved here and now if the Inland Revenue authorities would assess the writer's income on an average of, say, five years, instead of grabbing from him three-quarters or more of what a good year may suddenly bring him. For, let me say it again, sudden earn- ings are very often the outcome of years of steady work. They are not like winning money in a lottery or a football pool. And, in any case, the present policy of taxation. is short-sighted. A writer's work rises out of what he is ; and if he is encouraged oc, , forced to degenerate into a harassed creature, trying desperately to make ends meet, he is less likely to do good work and so bring, in the long run, money to the tax-gatherer.
The next article in this series is by a miner.
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