After working seven days a week without holidays and now approaching 60, Thomson, you might think, must be looking forward to a measure of comfort and security as the shadows of old age crowd in. All I want is enough money to carry on writing full time. And its not a huge amount of money. I suppose you could say that Ive been lucky to survive as long as I have, to develop a certain way of working. Sadly, longevity is no longer a sign of staying power. Ever since the credit crunch of 2008 writers have been tightening belts, cutting back and, in extreme cases, staring into an abyss of penury. Off the record, other writers will freely confide their fears for the future, wondering aloud about how they will make ends meet. Hanif Kureishi, for instance, recently swindled out of his life savings, told me how difficult his life had become. Never mind the money, the very business of authorship is now at stake. After a period of prosperity and tranquillity for British fiction that ran for about a generation (circa 1980 to 2007), writers are now being confronted with the hardship of literary artists through the ages. They knew luxury, and they knew beggary, but they never knew comfort I dont buy anything. No clothes, no luxuries, nothing. I have no private income, no rich wife, no inheritance, no pension. I have nothing to look forward to. Theres no safety net at all. He, and many others, are having to face up to unprecedented questions about their survival as writers. But drop a generation or two, and you find parallel stories: young writers grappling with a wholly new – and in some respects, hostile – literary landscape. In a business that relies on keeping up appearances, no one wants to admit this. Privately, theres a lot of fear. Money, once plentiful, has become suddenly scarce. Despite the uncertainties, new writers continue to struggle into the light. Burton, who was born in 1990, is a child of the digital age. She has never known a world without computers and says she has wanted to write since childhoodThe digital age, she says, is an extraordinary revolution in consciousness. The digital age is just as significant. We are developing a completely different mode of consciousness. Its at this point that the darkest anxieties of the night crowd in. Welcome poverty! Welcome misery, welcome houselessness, welcome hunger, rags, tempest, and beggary! Mutual confidence will sustain us to the end! I get the impression that people are sick of being lied to by corporations and governments, she says. Writers have nothing but their integrity. They are disaffiliated. They can tell the truth.
Posted on: Wed, 05 Mar 2014 06:07:12 +0000