How Writing Became a Career

Yet another vital NYRB Blog post from Tim Parks.

Still, none of this prepared us for the advent of creative writing as a “career.” In the last thirty or forty years, the writer has become someone who works on a well-defined career track, like any other middle class professional, not, however, to become a craftsman serving the community, but to project an image of himself (partly through his writings, but also in dozens of other ways) as an artist who embodies the direction in which culture is headed. In short, the next big new thing. A Rushdie. A Pamuk.

It’s rather as if the spontaneous Romanticism of the nineteenth-century poets had become a job description; we know what a romantic is (his politics, his behavior patterns), we know that is the way to literary greatness, so let’s do it. Coetzee’s novel Youth captures with fine wryness the trials of a methodical young man seeking to make a career out of becoming the kind of writer he is not.

Let’s consider a few of the changes that led us to this state of affairs.

You Might Also Like:

More from Conversational Reading:

1. On the Origins of Appropriative Writing I'm hugely intrigued by appropriate writing, as I think it's the way literary fiction has been headed for some time now and will be headed...
2. Joshua Henkin’s Ten Terrific Novels About Writers, Writing, and the Writing Life (Today we have a guest post from novelist Joshua Henkin. Henkin’s novel, Matrimony, about MFA students and writing about writing (among other things), is out...
3. DFW on Writing Full essay here. The best metaphor I know of for being a fiction writer is in Don DeLillo’s Mao II, where he describes a book-in-progress...
4. Writing Myths Over at Poets & Writers, there’s a pretty good list (with commentary) of myths writers "live by, but shouldn’t." Of the myths listed, these are...
5. Friday Column: Rewriting Motherhood: Why Career and Home Do Balance (at Least, for Me) (Today we have a guest column from novelist Jennifer Epstein. Her first novel is The Painter from Shanghai, recently published by W.W. Norton.) To say...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.