George Orwell, the seer of our postmodern era, once wrote, “All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery.” The motive Orwell alluded to is certainly not money. While personal experience confirms it, there are also enough surveys that reinforce what we writers already knew: Writing barely makes any money.

A recent survey of British writers declared their median income was just £7000 annually, “a sustained fall in…income from writing over the past 15 years of around 60 percent, pushing…earnings down to minimum wage levels.” The Gini coefficient is extraordinary—the top 10 percent of authors earn 47 percent of all income. There is discrimination among writers too. Men earn 41 percent more than women, and writers of colour or non-White backgrounds make 51 percent less than White writers.

An American survey showed similar figures: In 2017, a full-time writer earned just $20,300 on average. On Twitter, the #PublishingPaidMe hashtag revealed vast differences in earnings not just between genders or races but also between markets. Of course, anybody familiar with the writing and publishing industry in South Asia will confirm far-lower earnings from their writing than in the West.

It is no wonder writing as a profession has become less appealing to the younger generation because there just isn't enough money in it to sustain oneself. Most writers, including yours truly, have to take up parallel gigs to earn a living. It is the same beyond publishing. "Content" writers are paid low sums to churn out banal pieces. Younger writers are often promised "exposure" through publication in lieu of fees. Journalism, where some of the greatest writers once honed their art, is today a minefield, with creativity sacrificed in favour of homogeneity—or clickbait writing.

Knowledge production

While those who write fiction have it worse, nonfiction writers are certainly better placed due to a plethora of publications in the modern era. Freelance journalism is an attractive option, especially if you have connections among Western publications that pay far better than local, or even South Asian, ones. But here, too, writers are forced to accede to the demands of the publication itself. So it is no wonder commonplace tropes are found in stories about our societies and peoples.

Nepal faces no shortage in the production of knowledge itself. Although the dire state of our academic discourse has been highlighted by many, especially historian Pratyoush Onta, multiple research reports are generated every month, usually as a project grant, whose dissemination is restricted within a certain readership, usually the governing class. I’d venture there is not a single Nepali writer—especially if writing in English—who has not veered towards report writing or editing as an additional source of income. Of course, originality dies a slow death while producing such vapid content. But the writer survives another day.

There are, of course, some bestselling writers who earn enough from their works to not have to do odd jobs. But they are the exception to the rule, as many testified during the recent trial over the proposed Penguin-Simon & Schuster merger. The glamorous side of publishing―the soirees, the book launches, literary festivals, and hobnobbing with the rich and famous―gives off a false illusion that all is well within the writing community. But just as in the real world, author earnings are also tremendously biased towards bestsellers and books by celebrities, although, as publishing executives testified during the United States case, there is no correlation between the advances paid to authors and their book sales figures. New writers also have a tremendous amount of gatekeeping to overcome before a book gets published.

Several historical or sociological factors contribute towards why writing remains an underpaid profession. Knowledge production has historically been a tight-lipped affair controlled by society's elites, especially in our part of the world, where the act of reading and writing itself was restricted to certain castes. Even knowledge has its hierarchies: Subaltern writing is often rejected in favour of the mainstream. And, of course, the dominance of men in the public discourse has long shunted women's words as fillers to what men regarded exclusively as their domain. In the words of Virginia Woolf, “History is too much about wars; biography too much about great men.”

South Asian states―and authorities―have had a history of controlling the discourse to suit them. If a writer is willing to submit themselves to that end, several doors will open. Coteries and cliques are commonplace even in literature, despite all the platitudes about literature overcoming divisions. But to encourage diverse forms of writing―be it fiction or nonfiction― and which includes a possibility of dissent and resistance requires an enlightened state that sees writing as more than just serving goals.

For example, in neighbouring India, the New India Foundation combines academia and private sector philanthropy by the likes of Nandan Nilekani to fund book and translation fellowships. Its nonfiction fellowship awards young scholars a sizable annual sum for works that contribute to a “fuller understanding of contemporary India”. Perhaps the private sector can take a similar lead here in Nepal.

To write or not?

In the same essay as quoted earlier, Orwell outlined four reasons why writers write: The first is sheer egoism―a "desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc." The second is "aesthetic enthusiasm", or the desire to share an experience one may consider valuable. The third is "historical impulse", meaning to see things from the perspective of posterity, which feeds into the final reason, the self-explanatory "political purpose".

All four reasons weigh heavily on most writers. Collectively, we are a vain group of people who believe everything we write holds value and thus must be read widely. But increasingly, we are forced to become realists. Passion does not pay the bills, so we succumb to writing what we can to "seem clever" and keep the stove running.

Does that mean an obituary for creative writing has already been written? Certainly not. The advantage of being a “writer” ―a term as generic as Surf for detergent―is that there are no restrictions on what one can write about, especially if one does so with reasonable confidence. Of course, it would help if more books were read, not just the bestselling or award-winning ones. But the reason people write―although the act may appear “wholly public-spirited” to further an artistic discourse―is much simpler. We write because we want to―because we want to put into words ideas and imaginations. Everything else stems from this reality.

So writers will continue to find ways to make money, if only to write what they want to, taking hope from Virginia Woolf’s dictum that “by hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream.”