by David Drake
What most people mean when they quote Johnson is a different thing,though: "Money alone is a sufficient reason to write."
That statement is very easy to support. After all, people dig ditches because they'll be paid for doing so. People drive buses because they'll be paid for doing so. Why on Earth shouldn't people write books just because they'll get money when they turn the books in?
The funny thing is,I've never written simply for the money.(I have dug ditches, driven buses, mucked out a cow yard, and done any number of more unpleasant and less remunerative things than writing.)
Let me make explicit the limitations of that statement: I mean only the words themselves. I'm not implying I feel any sort of moral repugnance toward the practice of writing to order, nor am I suggesting that I'm superior as a man or as a writer to people who've made other decisions.
Furthermore, I am absolutely a commercial writer. I want my work to be read by the widest possible audience, and I want to get paid for that work. (Usually I do get paid, but I don't agree with Johnson: I've donated both fiction and nonfiction to causes which I believe in.)
It wasn't until I'd written an essay explaining why I continued to write when nobody would buy my fiction that it occurred to me to ask the opposite question: Why had I refused commissions to write things which were well within my skill set? The answer to the first was that I wrote as therapy, keeping myself between the ditches mentally after my return from Viet Nam. That realization gave me a point from which to attack the puzzle.
A fact of life in publishing is that the people hired to write media tie-ins, series novels, and similar projects, all have some stature. The only complete beginners involved are fans so heavily steeped in a fictional milieu (for example, Star Trek or Darkover) that their specialized knowledge gives them status.
My first experience of this came at a convention in 1978, just after I'd sold my first two books (but before they'd come out). Jim Baen, who as SF editor of Ace Books had bought Hammer's Slammers, began chatting to me about a great new project: he'd gotten the rights to Armageddon 2419 A.D. by Philip Francis Nowlan and had hired Spider Robinson to update it. Jim had then bought a case of beer for a pair of very successful writers and taken notes while they noodled about the direction further Buck Rogers novels should go. All that he needed now was a writer to turn those plot notes into books.
I pretended I didn't know that I was being offered the job. I was (I asked Jim many years later, just to be sure), and I knew that at the time.
It wasn't even that I was offended by the material. I'd read the title novella which formed the first half of the book (it wasn't for a few years that I found the second half, The Airlords of Han) and was impressed by the way Nowlan had built on his presumption that war in the twenty-fifth century would be along the lines of World War I.
But I didn't feel like writing Buck Rogers novels. It was really that simple. (Incidentally, the pay would've been even less than the $2,500 Jim had given me for Hammer's Slammers, but at the time I didn't know that or care.)
Two years later Susan Allison, who'd taken Jim's place at Ace when he moved to Tor, called. War books were hot in 1980 and the publisher of Ace Books had told all his divisions to start war series. Hammer's Slammers had been a success,so Susan asked me to write a Military SF series.She offered me full control over plot, characters, and everything else, so long as it was a series and it was Military SF.
This was a very good offer. I wasn't being requested to do anything I wasn't perfectly willing to do; I'd have gotten full credit and royalties, and Ace would pay something in the order of $7,500 per book.
I thought about it, then said I'd write one novel to kick the series off. Ace could have the characters and setting for other writers to use, but I wouldn't be involved in the series after that first book. (It eventually came out from Tor as The Forlorn Hope.)
When I turned Jim down,I was a full-time attorney with a reasonable salary.In 1980, I was a bus driver earning $4.05 an hour during the 20-30 hours a week I worked.(My year of driving a bus earned me a total of $6,100,including a couple months of summer layoff when unemployment—based on my previous job as an attorney—paid me more than I would've made if working.) I preferred to drive a bus rather than to write commissioned books which would take me no more than six months apiece.
Looked at from the outside, that would appear to be an insane decision. In a manner of speaking, it was insane: I was finally getting my head up from Viet Nam. I did many things for other people; writing was the only thing I did for myself. I was separating the two with an irrational rigor. I didn't want to be tied to a series then, even a series of my own creation. I would write what I felt like writing at the time, and only that.
Since 1980 I've found that the time I spend writing solo novels consistently earns me more money than the time I spend doing anything else. During those years I've created shared universes and written stories for shared universes owned by both myself and my friends. I wrote a novel in a game-based universe, and I've written over a dozen plot outlines for other writers to turn into novels on which we share credit.
I did all those things because they seemed like good ideas at the time. Sometimes they still seemed like good ideas afterward, and sometimes I've shaken my head and wondered and how I managed to get into something so stupid. That's life, after all.
Which is the point. Even in 1978 writing wasn't just a job to me: it was my life. And it still is.
Dave Drake david-drake.com
THE END
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