Compensation Part 4

Lie to people. Lie to your family. Lie to your friends. Let everyone in the community think you're rich, and possibly famous. Let everyone believe that the books you penned are best sellers, and if not here, or New York, then at least elsewhere like Tanzania, Tasmania or Transylvania. It is no business of anyone to know how much or how little you get compensated for the writing that you do. It does not matter that you earned nothing more than prestige rather than any money when some small literary magazine picked up and published your short story.

It doesn't matter, not really, but I have learned all sorts of assumptions people make when they find out you're a writer. The first is that you must be really misanthropic. You must be wicked smart. You are more than likely an atheist. And the one that I love is that you must be shy. When the same people discover that you have a book, or many books, published, they have other assumptions. First, you must be more than wicked smart. You're probably famous. More than likely you have money.

It's absurd. I recently met a flour miller. I was floored. I was so excited to hear about what he did with his day, how he got into that line of work and what sort of education he had to get in order to become a miller. Needless to say, I made no assumptions about him, his personality, his bank account or the internal circumstances that led him on the path of the flour miller. Why would I? I just never understood why being a writer holds such mystic with so many people. In a way, it might be because we are subject to books and short stories and movies that have a frustrated writer as a protagonist, and therefore we're led to believe that there is something mystical about writers.

I have always preferred movies about other lines of work. I like to read books that are about people with connections, missed connections and if the main character is a miller, well, all the better. I believe now, as I have always believed that the screenplay or novel with a writer as a main character is cheap, tawdry and not worth the time it takes to even consider it. To me, it says, “I'm a writer with nothing to write about accept how frustrated I am not to be writing.”

Consequently, here we are with a plethora of writer as fantastical protagonist, and viewers and readers taking this in. So, of course, when you're a writer, this is what people think about. It's sad, really very sad. And I suggest that you lie to anyone who wants to ask ridiculous questions. Let the mystic follow you.

Let the mystic follow you, sure, but maintain internal integrity. By which I mean, do not let frustration or writer's block lead you down the path of writing about a loathsome writer who cannot get a single word down on paper.

What do I suggest instead? Well, that's easy. Go out an live life for a while. Go out and work jobs, or hell, even a career. Take a trip. Read some books. Take a lover. Know that the time away from writing cannot be all that bad, as long as the time is spent purposefully. Not until you give up the ghost will you be unable to return to writing. And there is an entire world out there filled up with all sorts of life that is just available to be lived if only we are all willing to do it.

When it comes to the compensation, there are so many ways to quantify the experience of life as well as the experience of being a writer. It can be qualified by the bank account, that's for sure. How can so many writers, and great writers too, be so highly revered and don't have penny to show for it? And is it a curse of poverty to become a writer? And lastly, all compensation aside, don't we realize that this is life, and nothing more, and ain't a single one of us is going to make it out alive? Just knowing that, compensation enough is knowing that life was spent doing the write, err, the right thing.