Work-Life Balance for Writers?
I went looking for advice on work-balance for writers. Hoping to get inspired, I studied the lives of writers going back to the 1930s. Well, I shouldn’t have. Their circumstances were so different from modern life that the secrets of their success probably would not work for writers today. But their stories are still inspirational. That’s what I’m talking about today at SleuthSayers, in an article I’m calling:
Dimes, Mules, and Starvation: An Inspirational Guide to Short Story Success!
Basically, my focus is on writers such as William Faulkner, Ray Bradbury, John D. Macdonald, and so on who owed their careers and their finances to their ability to quickly conceive and create short stories. Back then, when print as king, magazines had an insatiable need for content, and some of the big magazines, such as The Saturday Evening Post, paid thousands for a single short story.
Even today, I occasionally see articles discussing how a writer might survive and make a decent living—about $50,000 a years, say—writing short stories. Those articles always come with a 50-pound sack of salt, but yeah, it’s theoretically possible if you nail many of the markets you submit to, you only submit to paying markets, and you know how to extend the financial life of the stories once the first round of rights return to you.
In the case of William Faulkner, he wrote short stories to keep him afloat while he worked on novels and screenplays. Ray Bradbury owed his first two published books to his phenomenal short story output.
Here’s just a taste of what I’m talking about:
In his lifetime, Faulkner wrote 125 short stories, possibly more. Fitzgerald wrote 181. Hemingway wrote 70, the slacker.
Another writer returned stateside after World War II and cranked out 800,000 words in his first four months out of the Army. He worked 80-hour weeks, amassing 1,000 rejections. He never had fewer than 20 to 30 short stories in the mail. Eventually, John D. MacDonald sold 600 stories, and launched a career writing mystery novels. If his early output figure is correct, he wrote just under 7,000 words a day during those critical four months.
Like I say, that’s an amazing story of one’s dedication to craft but not terribly helpful to a guy who is looking for lessons in the realm of life/work balance. MacDonald lost 20 pounds sticking to this regimen. If the purpose of writing is to earn one’s bread, he was doing it wrong.
Let’s see…who else have I got here? Nathaniel Hawthorne, another darling of school anthologies, calculated that he could only write about 10 to 12 short stories a year–about one a month. If he could manage to sell them for $25 each, he could support his family. Getting $25 a story was feasible but difficult in pre-Civil War America. It forced him to be exceedingly choosy about which publications he submitted to. Philip K. Dick wrote 121 short stories, and I’m sure every single one of them will eventually be made into a movie. The Canadian writer Mavis Gallant sold 116 short stories to The New Yorker. Our genre’s Ed D. Hoch wrote 950 short stories…
For years, one of my top-read articles on this site was one I did on William Faulkner. Some of the content of that article is in today’s SleuthSayers post. If you want to see the original post, go here:
10 Things I Learned About William Faulkner and Money!
While I’m at it, I should mention that I after years of dilly-dallying, I finally made all my short stories available for sale. The current count is 35 stories in all. That’s nowhere near the output of the famous writers I’m talking about today, but it’s nothing to sneeze at either.
The stories are available as standalone short story ebooks, and also bundled in five- or 10-story collections at a better price. Some—only a few—are available as paperbacks, mostly just because I wanted short works that I could hand out as freebies and thank you when I do book events.
The reason I didn’t put these all up sooner was I just didn’t know what sort of organizational structure would be best to help readers find them. I finally hit upon the idea to group them, one after the other, as a series of shorts.
Daggyland Singles
And yes, if you’re not a person who is obsessed with collecting all the cover art, you can save a ton of money by buying these stories in the five- or 10-story collections. This image will take you to the collections page for the crime and horror stories.
And yes, all the stories are available in world beyond Amazon, which includes Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Apple, and a ton of other international ebook bookstores and libraries.
The image below will show you what’s available and where.
And now, if you excuse me, I have to go be balanced…
Click to see your buying options…
Typewriter image copyright Joseph D’Agnese.
