In my best year, I made $930 from my writing. On the weekends, I applied to hundreds of residencies, grants, fellowships, and literary journals - as chronicled in my anti-résumé - and got rejected, according to my math, 97% of the time. During the day, I cleaned labs and ran assays. In the eleven years since I quit graduate school, I’ve worked mostly as a lab technician to support myself. And only a fraction of those who go to school to achieve that actually do, as one study demonstrated. But the data show this isn’t true. On the contrary, earning a steady living wage is the highest standard of economic success for a working artist in any field. Generally, they assume that if a writer is talented and works hard enough, she’ll get discovered and make a living for the rest of her life. This often comes as a shock to those who don’t work in the arts. I didn’t know it was almost as impossible. Like with the first, I knew the goal was hard. So my second goal was to make a living solely from writing. I made it all the way to graduate school before realizing that I really preferred Earth, and also, that I loved writing more than science - more than anything, in fact.
I’ve had only two career goals in my life. IStock Only ten percent of art school graduates make a living from their artwork.
0 kommentar(er)
