Writers' Union reports a "cultural emergency" as authors are working harder to make less

Because of the considerable overlap and complementarity between magazine freelancers and book writers, research on pay and work experience is always of interest. So with this week's release of a study by The Writers Union of Canada about the incomes of Canadian writers Devaluing Creators, Endangering Creativity. It contains the lamentable news that many writers are working harder to make less than they were in 1998 when TWUC last asked the question(s). 

81% of respondents have writing income that falls below the poverty line. TWUC says it considers this situation a "cultural emergency". 

“This is not a sustainable situation,” said TWUC Chair Harry Thurston. “If we want a strong and diverse publishing and cultural industry in Canada, it’s essential that creators are reasonably rewarded. Everyone — governments, corporations, institutions, and individual consumers — have a part to play in fairly compensating writers for the content they expect, need and enjoy.”

The study shows that respondents earn 27% less (taking inflation into account) from their writing that they were making in 1998 and that the average writer's income is $12,879 , about $36,000 below the national average. 45% of respondents said they were working harder to earn the lower amount. 

Even more dismaying, there is a significant gender gap, with women representing a majority in the industry but earning 55% of what male writers do. 

[click graph to enlarge]
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How to write about people

David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, talking about the art of the profile.

[Thanks to Parker Donham at The Contrarian]

This is a good -- but wholly American -- list of the best magazine articles ever

Much excitement in the Twitterverse about a list of what are said to be the "Best magazine articles ever (in English)", compiled by the website Cool Tools.  The list contains 27 articles from The New Yorker over the years, 17 from Esquire, 9 from Harper's, 8 from The Atlantic Monthly and 8 from Wired and ones and twos from more than a dozen other magazines. Nothing very surprising; these are all excellent magazines that publish and have published excellent, largely long-form journalism. I certainly don't quarrel with the top 5, as selected based on how many people cited them. However...

I bow to no one in my admiration for many of these articles which I have read; I am also glad to have links to many that I have not yet read. But I don't think I'm alone in saying that the list is mislabelled: it should have been the "Best American magazine articles". I note that there are no British, no Australian, no New Zealand and no Canadian articles included.

To be fair, the creators of the list invite inclusion of new links. Certainly, we should take them up on it and send in at least the top articles from Canadian magazines as selected by the National Magazine Awards, demonstrating that there is excellent, involving journalism being done outside the U.S.

Poems and projects and themes, oh my

Stuart Ross, in his back-page column for the current issue of  subTerrain magazine (the piece is not yet online) considers why so much of work of Canada's "emerging" poets and other writers seem to be themed "projects". (He speaks as someone who was this year a Canada Council juror.)

"Shouldn't writers who are learning the trade be trying out everything they can, creating a tangle of eclectic experiments, writing about any stupid thing that pops into their churning skull?" he asks.

Of course, being a columnist, he has some answers.

One is that writers are trying to emulate "significant" works like Christian Bok's book length poem Eunoia.

"Now there's a book that you can describe to someone and make it sound interesting: 'Oh, yeah, so each section only uses one vowel! It's really cool. Yoko Ono!' But how do you make Shroud of the Gnome [by James Tate] sound good? 'There's all these poems and they're great and one of them's called Shut Up and Eat Your Toad!' Just doesn't grab in the same way."

Another is that grant applications, with their requirement for a written "project description" tends to lead applicants towards homogeneity.

Another is the growth of Master of Fine Arts (MFA) programs.

"...a Project manuscript sounds important. It's more tangible; you can talk about it with your thesis advisor and it's like you actually have a topic for your discussion. I don't know that it's the way to write exciting poetry, though."

And finally, the sales force for publishers, who wants an 8-second pitch for a book.

"It's way better if we can say, 'A marvellous collection of poems about gardening and suicide' instead of 'Oh, yeah, this is the new poetry book by L. Beau Noodles.'"

When it comes to freelance writing, there's "good free" and "bad free"

[This post has been updated] Montreal freelancer Craig Silverman has made us aware of a presentation this weekend at an event for Montreal freelancers by Montreal media executive and longtime freelancer Mitch Joel. He replicated his speech in a blog posting called "The part of social media that freaks out freelance writers".

He maintains that blogging frees freelancers, letting them supplement their writing and writing without anyone's permision, unedited. Further that bogs can help sell stories and, while making a freelancer a better writer (practice making perfect), establish a reputation.

The challenge is that you have to mentally get over the hump that you're writing for free, because you're not. You're writing to free yourself.

Silverman, who's prolific and successful and who blogs and tweets, added his own comments about Joel's views in a post on the Toronto Freelance Editors and Writers listserv (available by subscription only). He says there is "good free" and "bad free" for writers: Good free includes writing that builds your brand, helps a charitable cause, helps promote your other work (books for instance) and builds your credibility. Bad free is providing articles for for-profit publishers because they're too cheap to pay and producing posts or op-eds that don't offer the opportunity to promote yourself.

Too many writers produce free work that does little or nothing to hep build their brand and business. Be stingy about free, but know that it can be of use.

[Update: This provoked another interesting response on TFEW from veteran freelancer Kim Pittaway:

I'd argue that your paradigm applies not just to the stuff you do for free: it also applies to what you're paid to do. There's good paid and bad paid. Good paid gives you the chance to explore topics you're engaged by and work with editors who push you to do your best work. Bad paid sucks the life out of you as you churn out one more piece on a subject you couldn't even summon up the energy to not care about--and then tortures you even more by putting you through an edit with someone who doesn't know what they want and will ultimately end up reworking it in their own image anyway. Good paid puts your work in front of those in a position to assign more good paid work. Bad paid--well bad paid inevitably gets seen by someone you'd rather didn't see it, or ends up popping up at the top the search results when you Google your name. Good paid contributes to clarifying your "brand" (yup, there's no avoiding it) while bad paid makes people wonder "Wait, that's not the same Joan Smith who wrote that piece on X? Weird that she'd write something like this." (And I mean weird in a bad way--it's not always bad to surprise your readers, but it is bad to puzzle them.)

The challenge is that when all paid work is scarce, it can be tough to turn down bad paid work. My advice: that's what pen names were made for. If you gotta do it, make sure you sign it with the name of that jerk who bullied you in grade three.]

Chronicling The End, a superb piece of long-form magazine journalism

(photo illustration by Ji Lee)

If you ever want to know what good magazines can do to make sense of the world, I can recommend to you the article The End by Michael Lewis in Portfolio. It's long form magazine journalism at its best and explains what went wrong in the financial markets by exploring who knew it was going to go wrong and how they profited by it. Lewis, who wrote the excellent book Liar's Poker, is bound to turn this into a book, too. But the beauty of magazine writing is that you get to read it now. The cover illustration of the piece says it all. [Thanks to David Hayes for alerting me to this piece.]

Major awards to be made to journalists researching, writing about health issues

The Canadian Institutes of Health Research is encouraging journalists in Canada to engage in research and creation of projects that promote health research. Five $20,000 awards and five $10,000 awards are to be made and the program is open to all working journalists in Canada and Canadian journalists working abroad, in all mediums.

Projects are expected to include a period of investigation to assemble the information needed for in-depth news or feature articles or documentaries. Some travel to interview information sources would be anticipated.

Awards will be made based on the

• Achievements and experience of the applicant;
• Novelty and importance of the ideas proposed (special consideration will be given to proposals that address areas of health research that are underreported in Canada);and
• The use of research-based information as a key component for the work proposed.

Applications with all supporting materials must be submitted by December 15, 2008, with awards taken up by March 31, 2009.

[Thanks to Steve Trumper for the heads' up on this]

Why "creative non-fiction" is a term whose time is over

It had never occurred to me before what the genesis was of the term "non-fiction" for everything that is not fiction, including magazine articles, essays and journalism. This was brought home by a thoughtful, somewhat mischevious essay "Tilting at Windmills for Literary Non-Fiction" by Ken McGoogan in the Globe and Mail Books section, published Saturday.

This is an important topic for magazines to consider since they are often the seedbed and genesis of non-fiction books and churn out reams of so-called "non-fiction" with every issue. Many a bestseller has been an elaboration of an article commissioned by a Canadian magazine and many a Canadian magazine has helped finance a bestselling non-fiction work by buying articles based on works-in-progress.

Yet, somehow, non-novels and magazine journalism don't get the respect they deserve. (This is particular important on the eve of the awarding of the Giller Prize, the prestigious, richer and much better-known equivalent of non-fiction book awards like the Charles Taylor Prize and the CBC Literary Award for non-fiction.)

Defining something that's not a novel, short story or poem in the negative, even using the somewhat tortured term "creative non-fiction", doesn't work very well and somehow misses the fact that factual journalism and narrative history is the majority of what readers read and presumably like best.

McGoogan uses, as an example, the Canada Reads competition on CBC.

Why, year after year, does it focus exclusively on fiction? In the real world, fiction accounts for less than 35 per cent of the Canadian book market, even if you throw in thrillers and Harlequin romances. Clearly, Canadian gatekeepers have bought into the notion that fiction is the Heavyweight Division and the literary novel is the Main Event.

Fiction is as a general rule, here today and forgotten tomorrow, or at least most fiction is. "It's narrative non-fiction that will stand, for sheer artistry, against any novel published this season," says McGoogan.

Quick now, list the 10 most important Canadian books of the past 20 years. All done? If your list does not include Frozen in Time: The Fate of the Franklin Expedition, by Owen Beattie and John Geiger, you have proved my point. One hundred years from now, when most of today's prize-winning novels have been consigned to the dustbin of literary history, people will still be arguing about that book. And Frozen in Time is just one example from the field I know best.

McGoogan was a winner of the Pierre Berton Award (notably given by the publishers of The Beaver: Canada's National History magazine) and recently published a fiction called Visions of Kerouac: Satori Magic Edition. In 2008, the BBC and the History Channel will broadcast a docudrama based on his narrative Fatal Passage. He worked as a journalist at The Toronto Star and The Montreal Star, spent more than a decade as books editor and columnist at The Calgary Herald and has written for Canadian Geographic, Calgary magazine, Explore magazine, The Beaver, Quill & Quire, B.C. Bookworld, Books in Canada, and The Literary Review of Canada.

He says we should abandon the terms "non-fiction" and "literary non-fiction" and "creative non-fiction" in favour of two fact-based literary genres, Narrative and Polemic, both on par with Fiction.

Where today we have two main categories, Fiction and Non-fiction, tomorrow we have three: Fiction, Narrative and Polemic. And that should translate into three G-Gs of equal prestige, three Giller Prizes, three Main Events - and 10 times the engagement.