Writer Lucy Sweeney Byrne: In the 16 years that I have been attempting to write ‘professionally’, I’ve made in and around €15,000

Before I got into writing, I never thought of myself as a particularly resilient person. Rather, I considered myself to be shy, over-sensitive. I’d always been the type of person to take the thread of some throwaway comment, made in jest, and to weave it, slowly over weeks and years, into a shroud, within which I could wrap my humiliating personality, along with all of my many, obsessed-over social and professional faux pas. In the heady solipsism of my twenties, when I was still under the illusion that other people thought about me in their free time, I assumed they thought of me as the dumbest, the most unlikeable, the ugliest and all around worst person in the world.
But I also thought, when I started writing seriously in my early twenties, that these were the usual, nay, the ideal qualities, required to be a writer. I thought that to have such a fragile ego proved a romantic sensibility, perfect for poeticization of the everyday. Who could possibly appreciate a flower, or anatomise a break-up, as well as someone who felt everything as deeply as I did? I never thought of Keats, or Kafka, or Woolf, as especially “resilient”, after all. They were gentle souls, easily bruised, a bit loo-la, difficult to know, no doubt, but able to wield a pen – as, I felt, was I.
Turns out, to be a writer, you need to have skin as thick as Shalamov – or certainly as thick as Duras, which is still pretty damn thick. You need to have the terrible self-assurance of King Lear in Act 1, before it all goes tits up, and the single-minded determination of Odysseus trying to find home, or of Dylan Thomas trying to find an open pub at 3am. It’s also probable, that unless you happen to be one of the lucky few who meet immediate success, or you’re interested in writing genre fiction, you will need to be resigned to a life of relative penury.
Writers such as myself strive and pray every year for bursaries that amount, in real terms, if we’re incredibly fortunate, to around half of what we might earn were we on a normal, salaried wage. And we are eternally grateful if we get it, because it’s often the difference made by a bursary that keeps us from packing away our literary dreams and instead turning to the disappointed relief of that aforementioned salaried wage. We persevere because we can’t help it or because, on some semiconscious level, we believe our break will come. That one day Sweden will call, offering, to our smug mixture of joy and despair, the Nobel; or, for lesser dreamers but ones who still have rent to pay, that Netflix will call, and say, “hey, that three-page story you wrote, we were hoping to make a series out of it, would you take a million for the rights?” (To paraphrase Wilde, writers are all in the gutter, but increasingly many of us are looking at TV deals.)
If success is a writer’s secret hope, they have to be, more than anything, delusional. In kinder words, one might say optimistic. If their hope is, rather, to write something lasting and worthwhile (as, embarrassingly, mine is), then they must be ready to never own property without financial assistance, to go on few holidays, and to eat lots of beans, pulses and pasta.
[ Anna Fitzgerald: I wrote seven novels over 15 years but ‘pure fear’ of rejection stopped me from seeking publicationOpens in new window ]
But let’s get down to brass tacks: in the 16 years that I have been attempting to write “professionally”, by which I mean write as my main occupation, every day, I’ve made (not including journalism, nor bursaries, the latter of which I have won for writing promised, not earned for writing already produced) in and around €15,000. Maybe a little more, maybe closer to €16,000, but no more than that. That works out as, at most, €1,000 a year. To put that in context, at the end of any year, had I somehow managed to spend none of what I’d earned from writing, I still would not be able to afford to rent a house in Navan for one month with the proceeds. I could maybe visit Dublin for a weekend, if I ate cheaply. Often, a story or an essay that I’ve spent a year working on will make me €200, which works out as about 54 cents a day. And if this happens, I’m delighted, because it means the story is getting published. The other, more likely possibility, is that nobody wants it. Now, after much experience, I’ve learned to consider it a good day in writing when I receive a positively phrased rejection.
Resilience is a bizarre quality to require of people who’s daily aim is to strip themselves bare of pretence and write something honest, or real, or whatever clichéd term you want to use to describe that low hum of the other life happening below the pomp and play of this one. Yet resilience is necessary. Without it, a person will fail, either in their writing or in their personal life. Sometimes, in the mornings, when I think of sitting down to write again, I feel like that guy in The Scream by Edvard Munch. For me, writing consists of many lonely days of bludgeoning self-doubt and vague horror. Then I remind myself that none of it matters, and that no one would notice if I stopped, and so on top of everything else I am forced to recognise my predicament as absurd. I tell myself that, in all honesty, it would probably be better if I did stop. There are enough writers out there – too many, in fact.
To keep faith, some writers form communities, or find mentors, or self-promote online. The key external element that helps me keep going has been finding an independent publisher who actively supports my work, through publication, encouragement, but more than anything, through kindness. Kindness, anyone in the professional arts will discover extremely quickly, is hard to come by. If found, it ought to be clung to, like a barnacle to a rock, or like a teenage girl to a naggin of vodka.
Banshee Press was founded in 2014 by three writers, Laura Cassidy, Eimear Ryan and Claire Hennessy. The magazine was the first place to publish my work, a decade ago now. My first story collection, Paris Syndrome, a series of stories whose through-thread was navigating the lostness of one’s twenties, was their first book. Now they’re publishing Let’s Dance, my second collection, whose through-thread is navigating the reckoning that comes in one’s thirties.
[ Paris Syndrome: Pushing boundaries to document experienceOpens in new window ]
Not that I realised that while writing these stories – it’s only when Banshee put Let’s Dance in a particular order, did I see that each one was turning and turning in the same, old widening gyre (apparently, for me, that gyre is made up of power, death, purpose, meaning, pleasure, the body – all the usual malarkey). As it turns out, it doesn’t matter whether I’m writing an ageing gymnast, a dying couple in Tipperary, a coke-fuelled Dublin session or a woman who eats herself, all I’m ever writing is how life seems to me. (Looks like I’m still as much of a narcissist as I was in my twenties – what a nightmare.)
People assume writing like this, close to the bone, requires more resilience than other kinds of writing but I don’t think so. I don’t think it’s the content that devastates most of us (because writing does, in various ways, be it in the form of breakdowns, addictions or general destructiveness, devastate many who try it), so much as sitting down at the desk and knowing that, however fruitful our morning or afternoon might prove, it will likely amount to nothing, earn us nothing, and be read by next to no one.
This can be looked at another way, of course. Instead of seeing sitting at the desk as a tortuous undertaking, it’s possible to see it as the most privileged of opportunities. How lucky, to get to sit down at a desk! Looked at this way, we can recognise that the writing itself (by which I mean the product; the print out, the email attachment, the published or not published piece of text), is really only the end result of something much more significant; something that is, genuinely, wonderful – and that’s living daily immersed in ideas, images and language. Living, daily, with the chance of writing a sentence that means something, that perhaps means even more than we hoped it would. It’s for this reason, I think, that so many of us stay in a profession that is damaging not only to our pockets, but also to our mental wellbeing.
When I’m feeling resilient enough to think of the whole thing like that, to not get burdened down by all the other stuff (oh, y’know, the ongoing sense of failure, the poverty, the dull-numb agony of everlasting rejections), writing seems to me like the best possible way to spend time. Also though, luckily for me, I enjoy eating beans, pulses and pasta.
Let’s Dance by Lucy Sweeney Byrne is published by Banshee Press