'It's a swinging experience': novelists who almost give up | Books

The 2022 release of A Paciros Raisin's fourth novel was his “lowest moment,” says the 45-year-old author. “It was an overwhelming experience.”

The book received positive reviews, but Raisin discovered that it would not be stocked in a major high-street book chain, and literary festivals said they had “no space” to program him. “I had to work hard not to succumb to a negativity that stifled creativity,” he says. It made him give up writing altogether.

Raisin had a “really big breakthrough” for her 2008 debut God's Own Country, which won her the Sunday Times Young Writer Award in 2009 and landed her a place on Granta magazine's 2013 shortlist. Great Young British Novelists. Raisin says it was an “experience that I normalized — and then never did the same for the rest of my life.” “I think my books have gotten better, but the buzz around anything I write has lessened.”

When he won the BBC National Short Story Award earlier this month, Raisin was “wondering if writing was still a viable thing for me to continue doing”. The £15,000 prize “will fill some financial gaps and see me through the next couple of years writing a book,” he says. But he understood that success in publishing was a “roll of the dice”. Meanwhile, university teaching remains his main source of income.

Raisin's situation is not unusual. A 2022 report by the Licensing and Collecting Association of Teachers (ALCS) found that median earnings for full-time teachers have fallen by more than 60% since 2006. Up to £7,000 per annum.

Yara Rodríguez Fowler, a 31-year-old writer of age-old novels who is a staunch archivist and still has things to say, realizes “how badly writing pays” and wonders, “What's the point of writing another one?” That made me think.

“My friends are civil servants and doctors; They have pension and maternity pay. I pursue a career that I feel passionate about and hold in high esteem. If you go to a party and say 'I am a novelist' it will be very cool. But in reality it is not so cool to be financially rewarded as a hobby.

Part of the problem, says Dice Chin, 29, is the public perception of what constitutes a “successful novelist” and what that means financially. Keeping house. She finds it hard to find a day job because employers have to, “Google me, see I'm a published author, and assume I'm a flight risk. In fact, I wrote a book and it was great. It has changed my pride and confidence, not my material circumstances.

Money isn't the only reason writers want to quit. Chin adds that she considered giving up trying to sell her second novel this year because “it's really hard to know who you can trust with a story that's so raw”. Since the book is about her community, she doesn't want to publish it unless she can make sure that whoever she is “works with respect. [her] society and does not commodify it”.

Comedy novelist Dan Rhodes announced his retirement from writing in the middle of pranks. The 52-year-old now says: “I can't imagine writing anything worth reading after I'm 30. “Eventually 30 people came and went, and I kept going – it turned out I was an idiot.”

Rhodes became “uncomfortable in the biz” after a financial collapse with his first publisher. He now works as a postman and has “found a small patch of scorched earth on the periphery where I can operate” – his most recent novel, Sour Grapes, is published in 2021 by independent press Lightning Books.

At the age of 49, Tom Bulloyer's novels include Audlandswar.Writing simply wasn't a priority when he became involved in the climate movement. In 2017 she joined the protest group Extinction Rebellion (XR), and in the face of environmental collapse, “the idea of ​​writing novels seemed futile,” she says.

That has now changed. “One of the reasons I was able to write again was because of the time I spent at XR.” He is now part of a community of writers exploring environmentalism. “No single book is going to make a big difference, but collectively we can.” His activism has given his writing a “perceived grounding” – a purpose – that it lacked before.

Meanwhile, Rodriguez Fowler finds ways to keep writing by radically changing his circumstances. She has left London for the north-east coast and is starting a PhD in the hope of one day landing an academic job that will give her “a pension, sick pay, maternity leave” and time to write.

But writing is worth the struggle, he says. “I was changed by novels.” It's a “sacrifice” that she can't write full-time, “but it has to keep the novel ticking over and over again”.