On not being paid

I have a very efficient publisher. Quarterly, I think it is, they send me a royalty statement and quarterly I make the same joke to my wife – "Here you are, darling, buy yourself something nice" – and then I spend it on, I don't know, a sandwich or a pint of beer. Does it bother me that the figure is invariably so low? Yes, but it isn't about the money. It's worth teasing out exactly what it is about.

I've been teaching for twenty-five years. For the last ten years, I've been the Head of English at a school for gifted musicians. It's a private school, but it's also not: many of our students rely on bursaries. I say this a lot but it's worth repeating, if only because there are times when what I say is all there is between me and the suspicion that an independent school is an independent school is an independent school. Ali Smith talked about how the commerce between two people can become a faith – how the world, in this case, becomes three-dimensional – and that's not dissimilar to what happens where I am. Regardless of the circumstances, these are children who are miles from home, their gift like a bulky suitcase that they can't put down. There's a lot of hyperventilating. There's a pseudo-sleepiness, too – tall gable-ends; "supper"; grass that the maintenance staff tend like a nativity – but it barely conceals the fact that the students work like horses. My task, it seems to me, is partly to understand this. Like all teachers, I'm in loco parentis. I like that, mostly. It feels like a good – a decent – job; an act of faith.

In other words, I'm in a privileged position. I like my job. Often I love my job. Moreover, I don't have to rely on my earnings as a writer. To be honest, what with launches and my own website and buying copies of my books for personal appearances, I think that I might have lost money as a writer. Would it be preferable if I hadn't? Of course it would. Would I like to earn more? Who wouldn't. Should I, though? Should I earn a living wage at what, for want of a better phrase, I'm going to have to call my creative endeavours? I'm not sure, and I'll try to explain why.

I don't want you to misunderstand me. Everyone deserves to be paid for whatever they provide. But things get a little more complicated, I think, when we ask what it is that we think that we're providing and who, exactly, we're providing it for. Nobody's ever asked me to write a novel. Nobody's ever said to me: "I could really do with a sonnet, Al." I have what Martin Amis calls "an anti-talent" for DIY and my running joke is that, although I can't put someone's shelves up, I can always analyse a poem should they ever need me to. One of the most exciting things about writing is that you do it ex nihilo: you create something out of nothing for the joy, often, of doing so. Of course, it hardly ever feels like joy. It feels like work. And, it's true, writing is work. (John Steinbeck once wrote: "The mountain labours and groans and strains and the tiniest of rodents comes out.") But I think it's important to remember that the whole business is voluntary. I mean, sure, in a very real sense it isn't: lots of writers write because they feel they have to. It's a compulsion, and we'll write even if we think that what we write is never going to be published. But we all choose to write. No matter that we feel we need to do it, nobody has asked us to. In which case I would suggest that nobody owes us anything. We're not commissioned artisans. We don't provide buildings or roads or architraves. Fantastic, if that great faceless "they" reaches into its capacious pocket. But "they" almost invariably don't and I think it's important to make your peace with that.

Which brings me to Jim Broadbent. Broadbent once expressed the opinion that actors really shouldn't be accepting knighthoods and other honours. They're "vagabonds", he said; they should live their lives as though they were. I thoroughly approve of this. Our job, as chroniclers and commentators, it seems to me, is to live apart from what we're chronicling. We need, to reverse the words of Lyndon B. Johnson, to be outside the tent pissing in. Not belonging, it seems to me, is, if not a pre-requisite of decent writing, a useful place from which to start. Watch Glastonbury if you want the perfect illustration of what happens when you allow yourself to be co-opted; when you make nice so that you can, year on year, expand your reach by performing on bigger and bigger stages. Music should blaze in the moment, not spend the whole time looking over its shoulder at a pension plan. A friend of mine once said that watching Coldplay perform on battered instruments was like buying street food from Marks & Spencer. I mean, God, they were bland enough when they started but now they consist almost entirely of what they think we want: of gimmicks, mostly; they're so busy gesturing outwards that they barely consist of anything at all. Sometimes I think that the best models for a musical life are those singers and musicians who were recorded by Alan Lomax back between the 1930s and the 1960s. I imagine Lomax hacking his way through the undergrowth to find a man or woman who, rather than living in a sort of purblind innocence, had been waiting for just this moment to belt out their one great song. Was Lomax an exploiter or an enabler? A bit of both, I think, but I do love the idea of that "one great song": of it being preserved, this pure, true thing, without all the nonsense of a follow-up "career". Because what is a career if not a progressive dilution? One compromise after another after another. There are times when I would be perfectly happy to contend that it isn't our business to think about anything as nebulous as "success". It's the most unpredictable and unreliable of yardsticks. It's like marsh light: it's not only difficult to verify but, the closer that you get to it, the less sure you are that it exists.

Because what is success? Is it, in John Lennon's memorable phrase, a stack of gold teeth in the bank? If not, then how do you measure it? In sales? In money? In prizes? I often think about one-hit-wonders; people who were smack bang in the middle of our consciousness for weeks or even months but who are now working in ice cream vans or selling insurance. It's bad enough, I think, thinking that you could have been a contender but what if you're not even sure what being a contender amounts to? Whatever criterion you use, it doesn't last. This is especially true of reputation (that slippery fucker), which I've certainly been guilty of chasing but which, when all's said and done, is just another version of the stock exchange. You have almost no control, it seems to me. Money? If you're a crime writer or a writer of rom coms or of "chick lit" then I imagine that one's hopes for a financial dividend will be factored into your calculations very early on. (And I wish you the very best of luck.) However, if, like me, you are one of those poor benighted souls who have always thought of themselves as, essentially, an artist in training – as someone whose primary concern is, in the words of J.D. Salinger, to create something "nameless and joymaking" (and, Christ, whoever thinks that they really have?) – then what do you do? It's highly unlikely that you're ever going to earn very much let alone get the equivalent of a rubber stamp. ("There you go," I used to think someone would say when I was younger. "You are now a writer." These days, when I think of this, I'm reminded of the Monty Python badge that says "You have been civilised by Kenneth Clarke".) No, all you have is your own artistic satisfaction, and we know what a fragile thing that can be.

All you can do is your best. That – that notional idea of "best" – is all that we can meaningfully strive towards. To repeat: there is no reliable nor inevitable correlation between what we do and its rewards. We either accept that or, psychologically, we drown. Perhaps, after all, artistic satisfaction is the nearest most of us will ever come to success. Of course, there are readers but even there I sometimes have my doubts. Lots of us write regardless; we write even if we think that no-one – not one single person – will ever read us. Moreover, I often suspect that there's an inverse ratio between the size of a readership and the quality of what one does. (I'm prepared to be told, of course, that this is sour grapes.) Still, I want them; of course I do. I will, I think, write separately, one day, about One Hand Clapping. Suffice to say, for now, that I set up the magazine in order that good – that serious – writers were given some decent exposure by being placed next to more successful writers like Ali Smith or Hilary Mantel or Simon Armitage or Elena Ferrante. It worked, too: we get a substantial readership and most writers, it turns out, are happy to help out in an industry and an economy that is more than ever stacked against us. Don't get me wrong: I know exactly how unrewarding it is financially to be a writer. But, for me, One Hand Clapping has only ever been about readers. I genuinely can't afford to pay people and, when people ask me about payment, I tell them that all I can offer is exposure but that exposure really isn't something to be sniffed at. In an attention economy what you want most, I'd argue, is attention. Writers can never be sure that they're going to make a living, any more than dancers or musicians or actors can. But to be read? To be noticed? To be praised? At the end of the day these are no small things. And, to return to where I started, I don't, when I read my royalty statements, mind about the money. I honestly don't. But I do mind that, say, only four people have bought my books that month. I want more people to read me. Why wouldn't I? All suggestions will be gratefully received.

Alan Humm is the editor of One Hand Clapping. You can find his novel, The Sparkler, here and his books of poems here and here. Rough Music, his second novel to be published, is coming out in September.