Stephen Elliott, author of The Adderall Diaries, wrote a long, honest article called Why I Write, which I enjoyed very much. It talks about how he got into writing, why writing is important to him, how little money it makes, how he deals with that, and how he writes. There’s some interesting stuff about the Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, which Elliott attended, and details on his publishing life. For one thing, Elliott published 5 of his 7 novels without an agent. For another, he purposely avoids teaching or pitching magazines. He makes $30,000 a year writing, which is nothing in San Francisco, but he writes what he wants. It’s a trade-off, as he says. Some interesting points:

But how do writers get by? That’s more complicated than it sounds. What do we mean by “getting by”? Do we need as much as we think we do? How important is it to make more each year than the year before? While working on a first book, almost everyone has a job that has nothing to do with writing. When people tell me they would write if they had more time I’m always skeptical. The hardest-working fellows at Stanford rarely wrote more than four hours a day.

…

It sounds spoiled, but I don’t think there’s anything wrong with considering yourself an artist. There are sacrifices as well as payoffs. When I was discussing my new book with two married writers, they kept asking how I could work without an advance. I didn’t see how they could work with one. They said they needed a certain amount of money and that they had children. They made their children sound like a tremendous burden, and I felt they were using the word need when they should have said want. There’s nothing wrong with prioritizing something higher than writing. The husband has sold a lot more books than I do and has plenty more money than I have, but being a writer seems to make him unhappy. One day, when he was telling me how easy I have it and about the kind of advance he needed, I snapped. I said his book wasn’t worth more than my book just because he has kids. We’re lucky to be writers. Nobody owes us anything.

More here.