Work of Fiction: Making a Living from Writing in the UK

Writing fiction is often seen as a desirable way to make a living. However, survey findings have shown that writers earn less than the minimum required to live on from their writing, despite the continued success of the publishing industry. Critical Cultural Economies Studies (CCES) has paid little attention to writers as cultural workers. This research explores how writers of fiction make a living, and how the ways that they think about and talk about writing function to support and/or undermine them as workers.

Based on 32 in-depth interviews with a range of fiction writers in the UK, the analysis presented shows how writing is a precarious way to make even a modest living, and that access to ‘writerly’ jobs depends on already being published. Writers’ motivations, goals, and perceptions of success indicate that writing is perceived as both work and not-work, and that being able to continue writing is more important than financial reward. Discourses of love, luck, magic and ‘being a writer’ function in complex ways to position writers in enchanted and elevated spaces which both nurture their practice and undermine their status as workers. Building on theories of hope in cultural work, this thesis develops a new concept of maybeness as a quality of writing as work and an ontological state occupied by writers who are never quite secure, as success is slippery and transitory and the stability writers crave is never quite achieved.

This study contributes to conversations around the lived experiences of cultural work from the perspective of the worker. It offers a more nuanced reading of the governmentality of discourse, and has implications for writers in the ways that they think and talk about themselves as workers and how the publishing industry perceives their contributions.