Respect for Working Writers

The Stack of the Week, and our first featured grad-student post

Photo by Yoann Siloine on Unsplash

Something has happened to writing over the last two decades, as I am sure many of you are aware: it has been deprofessionalized and demonetized, while at the same time it has proliferated to an extent unimaginable to earlier generations. Mind you, writing was never a path to riches, except for the very few, but in past centuries, professional writers were at least paid for their work, though often not as handsomely as they should have been.

In the eighteenth century, Samuel Johnson said that “no man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.” But in our century, very few writers, blockheads or not, can expect much reward for their writing. The internet has taught people to believe that all writing should be freely available all of the time, and, as a result, writers, unlike other professionals, are expected simply to give away their work—to readers, to plagiarists, to AI chat bots. Writing is simply “content,” and we pay for the delivery service, the technology, but not for the writing itself, while the tech oligarchs collect the fruits of writers’ labor. Meanwhile, in the academic world, while scholars are expected to write and to publish often, they do not expect to be paid for it, except possibly indirectly through promotion down the line—though this is far from guaranteed. A journal once contacted a colleague of mine in order to pay him a small royalty for a review that he had written for them, and he initially dismissed it, assuming that it was an attempt to defraud him. He was shocked that someone was paying him a tiny amount of money for his work.

But wait, shouldn’t we just write because we love it? Yes, we should love writing, but imagine saying something like this to an architect or a physician or a banker. They may all love their work, and I hope that they do, but they expect to be paid for it, and this fact surprises no one. But it seems that artists of all kinds are simply expected to survive on their passion for their craft. At a vestry meeting at my church recently, we were looking over the budget for the year, and when we got to the professional singers in the choir, someone incredulously exclaimed: “What?? We pay people to sing??” Would you be surprised if we paid the rector to preach or paid the accountant to balance the books?

Honest work of all sorts deserves respect: this includes the work of janitors, truck drivers, cashiers, attorneys general, baristas, psychiatrists, mechanics, nurses, and, yes, artists—even writers. Art is work. Writing is work. With all of this in mind, I give you:

The Stack of the Week

The author of The Stack of the Week,

Sarah Fay

, works tirelessly to help writers find the respect, the readership, and—yes—the remuneration that they deserve. Her newsletter,

Substack Writers at Work

, needs no introduction for those who have been using this platform for a while, but any newcomers or aspiring writers would do well to subscribe.

Sarah is the author of the extraordinary memoir Pathological and is currently serializing her new book, Cured, on Substack. She is a former editor at The Paris Review and teaches creative writing at Northwestern University. She is also a member of the Substack Products Lab and so has access to insights about how the platform works from the team who built it.

Sarah understands how hard writers work, how devoted they are to their craft, and how little they are usually rewarded for their labor. But she is working to correct this state of affairs by teaching writers how to garner the respect and attention that they deserve. Specifically, she is adept at identifying the value that writers offer and at presenting that value so that readers will appreciate it. Her subscribers receive weekly posts and regular Zoom workshops that provide practical, nuts-and-bolts methods and techniques to cultivate their writing careers on Substack and beyond. Furthermore, she offers one-on-one consultation sessions (for a reasonable fee).

My one-on-one session with Sarah was one of the most productive half-hours that I have ever spent and was well worth the money. I’m not exaggerating. She didn’t provide gimmicks or encourage me to write about something different or to “dumb down” my work. Instead, she was able to identify what I do well and to help me to present my work more effectively to my readers. The result was a massive (for me) surge of subscribers and engagement on PCF. I didn’t change my style or what I was writing about: Sarah simply helped me to hone my presentation in order to find a readership that would appreciate what I am doing here. I will be coming back to her regularly as I continue to work and as the PCF community continues to grow.

Sarah also works generously to promote other writers on the platform. Here, for example, is her guide to the best creative writing newsletters on Substack:

The 20 Best Creative Writing Substacks

If you are interested in growing as a writer on this platform, then Sarah’s newsletter is absolutely essential. Take a look at her pinned post for a summary of all that she offers.

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Photo by Mohammed Alqarni on Unsplash

The Word-Hoard

As I promised in PCF’s “Canonical Resolutions,” I will be featuring one graduate student post each Sunday during the spring semester. First up this week is

Jay Giles

, a first-year graduate student in creative writing, whose newsletter is entitled

The Word-Hoard

. This week, Jay takes us through a couple of Beowulf’s speeches in the early part of the poem and considers the hero as a rhetorician:

The Leader Unlocked his Word-Hoard

I look forward to following Jay’s thoughts on our readings through the rest of the semester. If you would like to follow along too, then subscribe to The Word-Hoard.

I’ll be back on Wednesday for the next installment of the Beowulf Challenge.

Thanks for reading, from my fancy internet typewriter to yours.

Photo by Daria Kraplak on Unsplash