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Various updates
Feb. 20th, 2007 12:42 pmFinished moving/organizing another bookcase in the office -- the Celtic linguistics/language/literature case. I think the next one has to be the general linguistics case because I think I can free up about a third of it to be the overflow for onomastics.
Almost got the tax stuff done today -- the tax man left a message yesterday evening confused about whether we were meeting today or Thursday (it was Thursday) and said he had everything ready. So I figured I'd check my calendar when I got to work and see if I could fit it in today, but then I didn't bring the Bag O Documents, so I didn't want to risk possibly needing something and having to arrange a third meeting.
A question from commentary on yesterdays writing post brought up some food for thought. If I weren't writing for pay, would I still be writing? And the answer is that of course I'd still be writing ... but I'd be writing very different things in many cases. The writing I do for my day job is the most obvious example, and the baby-name book comes in a solid #2. Neither of them would be things I'd write if I weren't getting paid for it. In the short fiction field, every short story that I've had published was one I wrote for the specific market that bought it. While I've certainly written short stories that never got published, the ones that did wouldn't have existed without their target markets. And while my various novels-in-progress may have a bit of work to find a market, the desire to make them publishable has definitely shaped their structure. Even if we aren't talking specifically about financial compensation, I find targetted markets and deadlines very ... inspiring. If left to my own devices, I would have wanted to write my PhD thesis on Welsh onomastics, but the existing market called for a different topic -- not that I didn't enjoy the topic I worked on, but I wouldn't have written it for fun in a vacuum.
Why? I think part of it is that there's far more stuff that I could write about than I have time to write, so external forces help me prioritize. Enjoying the topic is one priority; providing a useful result is another; getting external status and gratification is a plus; and getting paid is a plus. When they aren't combined in a single project, they get balanced off in different ways. At the basic-basic level, I can get personal creative gratification from writing a Standard Operation Procedure for cleaning a toilet ... as long as it's the best darn SOP that it knows how to be. I'm not going to write a toilet-cleaning SOP unless someone's paying me for it, but if they are, I'm going to enjoy it. At the other end of the scale, I can get a lot of personal creative gratification out of writing original poetry in Medieval Welsh ... but without a "market" -- without a significant chunk of readership who will appreciate it as more than a silly party trick -- I'm unlikely to do it very often.
So, yeah, getting paid for my writing isn't why I write, but it's one of the key factors that affects what I write.
Almost got the tax stuff done today -- the tax man left a message yesterday evening confused about whether we were meeting today or Thursday (it was Thursday) and said he had everything ready. So I figured I'd check my calendar when I got to work and see if I could fit it in today, but then I didn't bring the Bag O Documents, so I didn't want to risk possibly needing something and having to arrange a third meeting.
A question from commentary on yesterdays writing post brought up some food for thought. If I weren't writing for pay, would I still be writing? And the answer is that of course I'd still be writing ... but I'd be writing very different things in many cases. The writing I do for my day job is the most obvious example, and the baby-name book comes in a solid #2. Neither of them would be things I'd write if I weren't getting paid for it. In the short fiction field, every short story that I've had published was one I wrote for the specific market that bought it. While I've certainly written short stories that never got published, the ones that did wouldn't have existed without their target markets. And while my various novels-in-progress may have a bit of work to find a market, the desire to make them publishable has definitely shaped their structure. Even if we aren't talking specifically about financial compensation, I find targetted markets and deadlines very ... inspiring. If left to my own devices, I would have wanted to write my PhD thesis on Welsh onomastics, but the existing market called for a different topic -- not that I didn't enjoy the topic I worked on, but I wouldn't have written it for fun in a vacuum.
Why? I think part of it is that there's far more stuff that I could write about than I have time to write, so external forces help me prioritize. Enjoying the topic is one priority; providing a useful result is another; getting external status and gratification is a plus; and getting paid is a plus. When they aren't combined in a single project, they get balanced off in different ways. At the basic-basic level, I can get personal creative gratification from writing a Standard Operation Procedure for cleaning a toilet ... as long as it's the best darn SOP that it knows how to be. I'm not going to write a toilet-cleaning SOP unless someone's paying me for it, but if they are, I'm going to enjoy it. At the other end of the scale, I can get a lot of personal creative gratification out of writing original poetry in Medieval Welsh ... but without a "market" -- without a significant chunk of readership who will appreciate it as more than a silly party trick -- I'm unlikely to do it very often.
So, yeah, getting paid for my writing isn't why I write, but it's one of the key factors that affects what I write.
