![\"\"](\"http:\/\/farm3.static.flickr.com\/2174\/2248496087_78e5dba5ae.jpg\" "\\"Starry")
<\/p>\nI spent about an hour on Sunday morning trying to calculate what kind of travel experience I could have for ten dollars. I figured I could take the bus downtown, get a drip coffee and maybe a cookie, and then, take the bus back again. I could drive to Tacoma and back in my car on about ten bucks worth of gas, I might also be able to get a soda or a candy bar, but not both, from a 7-11. There’s some stuff I could do locally for free — walk over to the park or ride my bike down to the beach or hey, there’s the library, it’s a godsend, right? But travel, on ten dollars? What could I finance?<\/p>\n
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Van Gogh was poor all of his life, if I’m remembering my art history correctly. Crazy and poor. Gauguin, there’s a guy who had the sense to bug out to the tropics, but I read his letters home while I was hanging out at friend’s place in Italy and he was always hitting up someone, I think it was his brother, to send him money and materials. Vermeer used to cozy up to his mother in law for loans. Sure, all that work became valuable later, but while those artists were alive, they suffered unintentional vows of poverty. [We’re told that] Mozart died poor too, tossed into an anonymous grave while now his likeness graces countless money making souvenirs and schemes. Who can name all the artists — be they writers or musicians or painters — who left their lives poor because art, like crime, does not pay.<\/p>\n
On Sunday morning, I slouched on the sofa for an hour, maybe it was longer, thinking about these underpaid artists. I thought about how, when I used to paint, (I did not suck as a painter) I paid for materials and a place to work and when I’d ask for 300 dollars for a painting, potential buyers would walk away — perhaps 50 was more a fair price? That price would leave me with not enough money to pay my rent, not enough money to cover the time I’d taken to make a painting, or the weird immeasurable part of thinking things up and finding that a drawing of a bird on a scrap of paper stuck into a notebook two years ago was exactly the right thing to use as a stencil for the upper right corner. Then there was all that education, learning how to mix color and how to see and stitching together the back story for a painting out of the wallpaper in my grandmother’s apartment and failed gardening attempts and waking up in the middle of the night knowing you are in the wrong life.<\/p>\n
I don’t waste a lot of time feeling outraged about writer’s wages. It’s not a good use of my time — of anyone’s time. Plus, it turns out that in spite of all the outrage, someone, perhaps you reading this right now, will write for less than I do and do so joyfully. Perhaps you are keen to have a soapbox on which to stand and that is more important than cash in your pocket. Perhaps you are new to the written word and figure writing for small change is a temporary step in your path to the big bucks, it’s the publishing equivalent of doing your time. I also know that as a “real” writer, I’m supposed to devote a certain amount of time to pursuing publication opportunities — the artists equivalent of sending out your portfolio and hoping for a gallery to charge you an arm and a leg for framing while keeping 50% of your sales as commission — “Oh, but we bring in the buyers, you know!” I’m no good at marketing, I’m a writer, not a salesman, and I’m aware that being a salesman is a critical part of being a successful writer.<\/p>\n
I have a sophisticated enough understanding of the game to understand why there’s no money in writing, especially now, as publishing collapses. Hand set type was eclipsed by digital publishing and paper is losing to online writing and now, anyone who hits publish can call themselves a writer. Words are a commodity and so cheap, too — your six or seven figure Internet start up guy knows that Google likes words, it eats them as a snack from Costco sized packages and writers are everywhere, eager to have our writer’s vanities catered to by the thrill of seeing our luscious words under the weighty shadow of a digital masthead not our own. We feed the machine now, cranking out endless boxes of lunch sized essays but we can not feed ourselves on the resulting income.<\/p>\n
Sunday morning found me feeling bleak and sorry for myself and truth be told, a little bit angry. The source of this gray black mood was an ad seeking travel stories from “real” writers; the pay for said stories was ten dollars a piece. Ten dollars. What kind of travel experience could I have for ten dollars? (I should be clear — it was not so much this particular ad that pushed me down the well, it was the realization that what the publisher was offering was quite common.) Surely there are places in India or Tanzania or Guatemala where ten dollars could get me an amazing experience, be it a taxi ride across town or entry to a local theater. It’s three dollars, I think, to attend the Honolulu Poetry Slam and that could potentially make for a great story, but even in low season, and from the West coast, a plane ticket is about 300\/USD round trip. This potential ten dollar story would put me 290 dollars in the hole and I have not had a meal, taken public transit from the airport, paid for a bed, given myself one thin dime for my writing time, or paid the three dollars to see the poetry slam.<\/p>\n
Once, a long time ago, I was paid a dollar a word to write a 750 word piece about a very fancy hotel in Vienna. My hotel stay was comped but my travel was not — a plane ticket from Seattle to Vienna was about 900\/USD at the time. And then, there were tips and the subway and coffee and so many other incidentals, my profit on that piece ended up negative. The guidebook I wrote to Hawaii netted me 400 dollars after expenses and I spent about two months working on it — that’s right, that’s 200 dollars a month. Sometimes I feel that perfectly understandable craving to get my work off of this little blog into places that will wrap it in a veneer of credibility. When that hits, I call on the painfully logical part of my brain to explain to my writer’s fragile ego that it makes no economic sense at all to pursue travel writing gigs elsewhere. The internal writer pleads with the internal accountant — “But we have to do more than just BLOG!” — as though blogging were a dirty word — and the writer always loses. The accountant, she writes the checks and both sides of me like a warm, dry, place to sleep and regular meals and the fictional comfort of a very crappy health insurance plan.<\/p>\n
It was not raining on Sunday morning, but it might as well have been. I felt so saddened by the idea that the kind of writing I like to do has been utterly devalued. It’s a good living for a select few and for the rest, perhaps they’ve taken that unintentional vow of poverty. Or they have patrons or a modern kind, wives or husbands or magical income from some unknown other source, an inheritance, perhaps, combined with a modesty of lifestyle. Maybe they’ve made a deal with the devil — the devil isn’t a great business partner, but man, can he sell the idea — and that’s how they manage groceries while writing stories about travel. I sent the devil packing, lowered my expectations for what my writing could bring me, and got some skills that let me earn an okay living while not eating all my time. It’s not a bad compromise, most days, but on Sunday, I sulked on the couch thinking about how ten dollars could not begin to compensate me for everything that comes with me when I sit down at the keyboard. Ten dollars felt like an insult, the compromise felt like a sell out, and writing… writing… Van Gogh was crazy. He loved to paint, you can see it when you look at his work. I love to write. I really love to write and sometimes, sometimes, it makes me more than a little bit crazy.<\/p>\n
Van Gogh’s Starry Starry Night poached from Flickr via Creative Commons. Vincent, wherever you are, I’m sorry. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I spent about an hour on Sunday morning trying to calculate what kind of travel experience I could have for ten dollars. I figured I could take the bus downtown, get a drip coffee and maybe a cookie, and then, take the bus back again. I could drive to Tacoma and back in my car … <\/p>\n