People see me reading in cafes and remark on it. “Oh, the life,” they say, with a laugh that is not entirely a joke. And I get it. It’s 11am; I have a coffee, a novel and no place I need to be. Much of a writer’s work can look like leisure. Even while working, you can appear to be doing nothing at all.
But reading is part of my job. Books arrive with a deadline attached: a review to write, an author to interview, a public conversation to lead. I also assess students’ stories and unpublished novels. Reading may not look like work, but increasingly it is how I earn my living. Between the first page and the last, I am trying to pay the mortgage.
Until February, paying the mortgage was easier. I worked full-time in university administration, managing the Erasmus programme, and earned a secure salary. Every Thursday, my salary arrived: the same amount, reliably, each week. There was holiday pay, sick pay, a pension: the quiet machinery of a secure life. I could have stayed indefinitely, but I was tired of placing my writing into whatever time remained. So, with two children and a mortgage, I took a hefty risk: a career break.
When I say I took the risk, really we did. My wife works full-time, and my decision altered the mathematics of her life too. We have the same bills, but now only one salary arrives reliably. There is less give when the car makes a noise or the after-school activities begin. A year devoted to writing sounds romantic. In practice, it is my wife listening as I explain that an invoice is still being processed.
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I did not take the risk blindly. I had published my first novel, sold my second and been appointed writer in residence at Maynooth University. On paper, I seemed established enough. What I did not know was whether those achievements could be assembled into a living.
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So far, that living has come together in fragments: an advance for my next novel, divided into four instalments across two years; courses, reviews, articles, workshops, festival events, manuscript assessments and mentoring. I can do all this because Ireland supports its writers unusually well. Arts Council bursaries and local-authority grants can buy the time in which work is made; residencies and organisations such as the Irish Writers Centre and Munster Literature Centre create paid opportunities around it. They recognise that time is not separate from the work; time is what the work costs.
But the money remains irregular. Some months everything falls into place but if a course does not fill, an application fails or an invoice is delayed, I begin moving the pieces around again.
The headline rates can also be deceptive. An article might pay €200. To replace my old salary with articles, I would need to write 365 a year, one every day, by which point I would have nothing left to say. Teaching may pay €80 an hour, but only the teaching hour counts. Nobody pays for preparing the class or reading students’ work. A €250 event can mean reading and analysing two novels, pages of notes and days of thought. What the market recognises as work is often only the moment the work becomes visible.
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To make those sums add up, you really have to graft. I pitch editors, advertise courses, apply for grants, send invoices and follow up. Much of a writing life is administration, spreadsheets and calculators. There is always something I could do that might earn money, which makes four hours spent on a novel feel almost illicit. The novel brings in nothing that afternoon. It may bring in nothing for years.
And yet these have been among the best months of my writing life and some of the most precarious financially. I have work booked, invoices due and another novel coming out. Things are going well, but the bank account does not always receive the news. This may be the strangest lesson of trying to live by writing: success and solvency are not the same thing. A writing life is measured in books published, work commissioned and invitations received; a household is measured in what must be paid, and by when. It is possible to be flourishing on paper while waiting for the money to arrive.
I do not know yet whether I can make this life hold. I only know that I had to give it the chance. The difficulty is earning money from writing without allowing the pursuit of it to consume the time you left your job to protect. Perhaps that is the bargain: the work for which I wanted freedom is also the work I must keep stepping away from in order to finance it. From outside the cafe window, none of this is visible. There is only a man with a coffee and a book, apparently living the life.
The Language of Remembering by Patrick Holloway is published by Epoque Press
