On Making a Living Doing What You Love

by Nicolette Bethel

When I was a child and people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would invariably answer, “A writer”. The responses I got were various. “Oh, that’s nice,” some people said. They didn’t mean it one bit. Others laughed as though I’d told the greatest joke this side of Vegas. Others stared at me as though I’d just said something foreign, as though my tongue had not formed words that were English at all. And one person – my geography teacher – told me, “Oh, no, you’re too good for that. Writing will never earn you any money. Why don’t you think about being a lawyer or something like that?”

But a writer I wanted to be.

And here I am, all grown up, my answer still the same. What do I want to be when I grow up? A writer. But. Time is running out for me. Writing is a jealous hobby, difficult to do well, arduous when you want to make the right point, time-consuming, greedy. It’s too selfish to be a part-time thing, and I have to make a living.

And making a living writing is something that is impossible in this country — at least for those who choose not to settle for journalism as the next best thing — no offence to journalists. I needn’t list the reasons that it’s impossible; I’m sure you can think of several yourselves. It’s the rare writer who can survive off his or her earnings, unless they are in advertising or journalism or the law. For those of us who simply love the language and The Bahamas, there is very little choice indeed.

And so I teach others how to write. You know the saying: those who can, do; those who can’t, teach. I have always fought it; it suggests that teachers are failures, second-rate beings who can’t succeed at what they want, and so they teach. But more and more the saying rings true. It’s not that I am not capable of writing. But I cannot make a living doing what I love — doing what, I dare say, God called me to do — in the land in which I was born. And so, because I cannot (through no good fault of my own) write for a living, I teach.

And I am not alone. I speak as a writer, because that is what and who I am. But there are hundreds of us, perhaps thousands, Bahamians, who have been gifted with the ability to create new realities out of thin air — people touched with the need to express themselves in movement, in colour, in line, in song, in film, in music, in performance, in the assumption of another character, in illusion, in the written or the spoken word. Only a tiny handful of us can do it, and that handful is struggling. The rest of us have to labour in jobs that are second best for people who do not understand us or what we do and squeeze our talents around the edges of our lives.

And so what? You wonder. Why should this matter? Why should being able to make a living doing what you love be at all important?

Well, first of all, because you love it, and because it’s not frivolous. Despite what many people imagine, the arts — which begin in self-expression, develop through social commentary, and conclude by illuminating the human condition — are really the foundation, and not the frill, of human civilization. A society that does not express itself artistically is simply a conglomeration of people who live side by side. Because there is nothing concrete to link one to another, they are simply a group of individuals walking down the same road together, but they could as easily be enemies as friends, and there is nothing at all to stop them from killing one another.

And second of all, because it is the creative impulse that makes us human. I’ve said it before, but I’m not sure that we have fully grasped the concept yet; we’re too busy consuming what others have produced, and we don’t value either the process or the product of our own artists and innovators. As a result, the humanity of the Bahamian citizen has been compromised. We allow ourselves and our reality to be defined by other people, because we have made it difficult, if not impossible, for our creative artists to make a living doing what they love.

In order for us to create a society out of this population we have living within our borders, art, self-expression and creation cannot be regarded as luxuries that can be sacrificed whenever the subject of money is raised. Every civilization worth remembering has made a place for its artists. It has supported them, by commissioning individuals to write or paint or sing for a living and for the state, or by allowing them to support themselves. We do not recall the greatness of Greece or Italy or Great Britain for their lawyers, for their newspapers, or for the number of items their factories turned out in a given year; rather, we remember them for their architecture, their literature, and their art.

From Sophocles to Shakespeare, from Michelangelo to Picasso, from Confucius to Soyinka, from Homer to Walcott, the greatness of a civilization has far less to do with the apparently “necessary” professions than we imagine. Without the works of artists, teachers have nothing to teach, construction workers will have nothing to build, and retailers will have nothing to sell. You may counter by saying that others have already done the work for us, and that we don’t have to produce anything original of our own. But that is how we have built our society already, and what we have built is coming apart at the seams. The clothes we have put on were designed for other people, and we should not be surprised when what we have borrowed doesn’t fit us all that well.

The time has come, I believe, for our society to place emphasis on allowing Bahamians like me to make a living doing what they love. Of course, this will mean starting to pay one another for their art. It will mean understanding that when we approach a writer to ask for a play to be written, or a director to produce a show for a purpose, or a musician to play somewhere, we will have to pay them for their action; but when we do, we will discover far more about ourselves than we knew before. And we will begin to create a community out of this group of individuals all walking along the same road together; and maybe, after some time, ours may become a civilization to remember.

Comments

[drew Roberts]

I will put this link at the top. You may want to explore it before reading further. (Or not.)

http://www.openbusiness.cc/2006/09/19/a-swarm-of-angelsopen-business-meets-filmaking/

"we will have to pay them for their action"

This I am all for. For those that want, need, demand to be paid for those actions.

Here is another link:

http://fundable.org/

I will try and link that into what follows as well.

I suggest we might try paying Bahamian "artists" to create original works and place them under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.

See:

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/

and

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/legalcode

We might use those guys at fundable to raise / commit the monies.

Could we start by trying to raise a million dollars to fund the production of a Bahamian Movie for children?

Are there any movie makers in the Bahamas who would take on such a project?

How about the want to be writer who wrote this piece? How much would you need to earn for a year to give yourself totally to writing and put all of your works for a year under a CC BY-SA license? Let us know, perhaps we can get some funding going for you.

I am going to be trying to write another nanowrimo novel this year:

http://www.nanowrimo.org/index.php

and I hope to get a per word sponsorship going for my efforts this year. The work will be put under a BY-SA license and made available on ourmedia.org like I did with last year's novel Tings:

http://www.ourmedia.org/node/111123

I got a decent amount of support two years ago when I requested it, but did not seek any last year.

We might just need to start thinking "outside da box!"

all the best,

drew

[nicob]

Drew, every time you talk about Creative Commons I think it sounds like something I would really buy into but I don't really understand it. I've read the pages you linked me to but need you to translate the legalese into basic info.

Well, that's not strictly true. What's really going on is that my job requires me to fight for copyright for the artists who are not getting it, and so creative commons seems to be at odds with that. But as a writer myself, I'm finding the idea of creative commons interesting.

And the fundable idea is a seriously good one, I think. I don't know about the movie for children, but I could imagine it maybe working for the production of plays and suchlike.

Thanks for jumping out-da-box as usual.

[drew Roberts]

Nico,

I don't really mind people fighting for the copyrights of those who are being denied theirs. Or just for copyrights in general. That means they are fighting for mine as well.

I do think that the way the copyright system is run in the world today is broken in many respects though. (If you want to discuss this sometime, I would be happy to. Online or in person.)

See, I come into the Free Culture world from the Free Software world. I run a desktop daily where I have access to over fifteen thousand Free Programs (think libre) available to me for free (think gratis) or I can pay for them if I choose.

So, I know that doing things in this alternate way can be both practical and rewarding.

Now. Here for example is my last year's nano book "Tings":

http://www.ourmedia.org/node/111123

It is available under a CC BY-SA license:

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/

This gives you or anyone the right:

to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work

to make derivative works

to make commercial use of the work

POVIDED:

Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor.

Share Alike. If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under a license identical to this one.

also:

For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work.

Any of these conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder.

The legalese is harder to understand.

Are you really having trouble understanding this? Or is the difficulty more in understanding the economics of the deal or the motivations as to why someone would choose to do this?

Let me just say that Creative Commons is not at odds with your job (well I am only really interested with the copyleft type CC license which is BY-SA and the other Free license which is BY, but mostly BY-SA) as it is the artists themselves that have to choose to license their works in this way. No one forces them.

Those that catch on to the benefits of doing things in a new way can benefit from it. Those that don't can choose different licenses, or stand pat.

Let me also say that one of the biggest issues I have with copyrights today is that they tend not to benefit the actual creators all that much. On the whole it is the middle men and the money men who seem to benefit the most. Have you read up much on how the music business actually works?

Also, are you aware that there are those in the US who are currently attempting to patent plots? (IIRC it is plots.)

http://www.storysouth.com/comment/2005/11/storyline_patent_could_hurt_th.html

One of the first links I came upon in Google.

all the best,

drew

[landra]

i would like to know exactly who wrote the editorial entitled on making a living doing what you love.

[nicob]

Drew, I would love to discuss this — online, so I can have a written record to remember and use in my job, and in person as well, because it seems like a big topic that could go on and on forever.

I'm not having trouble understanding either the principle or the motivation, but some of the details are confusing, largely because I have not entirely mastered the breadth of copyright law yet, and while this is similar it is quite different.

And you are right — plenty of copyright doesn't help the creators of the works. Most of the time copyrights are there to benefit the disseminators of the work — the record companies, the book publishers, the movie production companies.

I suppose what I'm trying to work out — given the fact that all of this has implications for the Cultural Policy as well as for Free Trade agreements of various kinds — is how it all fits together. I'm trying to catalogue Creative Commons in my head so that I can work out whether, or where, to include references to it in the Policy.

Landra, thanks for stopping by. My apologies for leaving off the byline — it's there now!

Nicolette Bethel
author

[Bahamian Writer]

You're so write/right. Making money writing in the Bahamas is like pulling teeth. I left the Bahamas years ago because most Bahamians have not respect for home grown talent. They are brainwashed and if you ain't white, or foreign, or sleeping "wit somebody darn politician husband" then "ya can kiss ya bongie and money goodbye".

Thus, I understand your sentiments. The problem is compounded by several factors:

* Local politicians typically are threatened by any talented Bahamian that is not in their circle
* Bahamians are not taught to respect their own culture so have a strong sense of self-hate
* Bahamian stores do not promote or purchase enough Bahamian product
* ZNS, etc

[Nikell Johnson]

I like this article and I totally agree with what is said because I too want to become a writer when I grow up but I don't want to have to do it in another country just to make a living. I am a COB student and because I know I can't make a living off writing in The Bahamas, I am forced to choose another career path. Presently, I am finding a hard time doing that because I know within myself that writing is my purpose and I don't feel as if any other job would make me happy. However, choosing another career is what I have to do and my passion for writing will just have to be set aside. I am glad that someone in The Bahamas addressed the fact that there should be more attention paid to the arts and hopefully, someday in the near future, something will be done about it.