GoKawiilIn the fall of 1971, Wallace Stegner, who was running his eponymous fellowship at Stanford, offered the writers in his program some financial advice. The Stegner Fellowship, which included a $3,500 annual stipend—the equivalent today of about $28,000—was one of the most prestigious an early-career writer could receive. Past participants included Larry McMurtry, who had written his debut novel, Horseman, Pass By, while in the program, and Ken Kesey, who had done the same with One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Now, the fellows—looking forward to completing the program, publishing their novels, and maybe even earning a bit more money—asked Stegner what to expect. In the twenty years the program had been operating, one fellow asked, how many were now making a living as writers? “Young man,” Stegner replied, “you don’t understand. You’ve chosen a profession that doesn’t exist.”
Fifty years later, being a writer is still unreal. According to the Authors Guild’s most recent income survey, which queried 5,699 book authors in 2023, the median book-related income for traditionally published trade authors was between $15,000 and $18,000. When combined with other writing-related income, the total climbed to a measly $23,329. Fifty-six percent of the respondents relied on side jobs to survive.
Today, by some estimates, the average freelance journalist is paid around $0.25 to $0.50 per word, and at the highest-paying glossies, rates have hovered around $2 per word for more than a decade, even as inflation has diminished the purchasing power of that seemingly handsome fee. Trump’s slashing of hundreds of National Endowment for the Arts grants in May 2025 may have been unique as an expression of political malice toward the arts, but otherwise it was on trend with years of cuts to fellowships of all types. Even the Stegner Fellowship has suffered from tightened budgets: in August of last year, Stanford’s Creative Writing Program, which Stegner founded, gathered twenty-three of the program’s lecturers and announced that their current contracts were being terminated.
Writing itself can serve as a form of spiritual recovery from the labor that funded it.
People at all levels of the publishing industry, meanwhile, are mostly mum on money matters, perhaps even more so in private than public. At so many parties or book launches, a quick way to earn the scorn of attendees is to ask: “How do you really make a living as a writer?” How did the twenty-seven-year-old freelancer who wrote all of three New Yorker features a year buy her Brooklyn Heights two-bedroom? By what magical means did the short story author for all the hot lit mags convert pennies and prestige into health insurance? Could book reviews, even brilliant ones, pay for bicoastal lives in Brooklyn and Los Angeles, or even bohemian ones in Lisbon and Berlin?
Worse than being curious is appearing confused when no (credible) answers are given. This silence, of course, conceals the way in which cultural capital is underwritten by capital capital; the ways in which literary legitimacy is made possible because someone subsidized it. It’s ironic that we call this supposedly tactful silence “class” when one’s class status is precisely what it conceals.
Answering this question candidly, on the other hand, is risky, especially in the wrong company, and even more so if survival has included taking on work that isn’t teaching or more mercenary forms of writing and editing. A side hustle can be treated as evidence that one has not been “successful enough” with her creative work to survive on it as her sole source of income. In this way, silence conceals from a collective narrative not only the privilege of wealthy writers but also the side hustles that underwrite the creative work of writers who aren’t wealthy, those dubious gigs so many of us have had to do at one point to pay the rent and buy groceries while trying to survive the MFA program, waiting on the late magazine fee, burning through the book advance.
A skeptic might say there’s no need to compare oneself to others. But when you are attempting to figure out a career in a profession that doesn’t exist, comparisons are useful, even necessary, because they clue you in to the fact that your struggles might be real rather than imagined—that is, they might be as much the result of structural obstacles as purely personal stumbles. I myself arrived in New York in 2011, a bumpkin from the rural provinces and the son of a waiter and an ex-con, to take an unpaid internship at my favorite magazine; growing up, I hardly knew an adult who had a white-collar job, and I had certainly never met a professional “writer.” In the city I worked as a lifeguard and dogsat to pay for sardine dinners and cell phone service, and I drove myself mad trying to figure out how my peers paid for cocktails and brownstones, until I figured out my primary side hustle, one common among writers: editing. Navigating the fifteen years that have passed since then would have been much easier if people had been more candid about the realities of survival. Not every writer floated on family money—unbeknownst to me, heaps of my peers were also patching together piecemeal existences—but because of the taboo on discussing the survival math of the writing life, I too often assumed every writer had a sugar daddy somewhere. This made the already solitary nature of the nonexistent profession even lonelier, even more alienating.
I wish more people had the courage to be as honest with me then as the contributors to the forum are now in relaying their own side hustles. The writers here and in the accompanying online material include a celebrated novelist with a major publisher who has worked in New Jersey factories for twenty years; a current MFA student at Columbia (in fact, one of my students whom I met in the course of one of my other side hustles) who is paid to cuddle strangers; and a Pulitzer Prize winner who wound up waiting tables in New Orleans’s French Quarter before becoming homeless.
The accounts here describe the financial compromises, the emotional costs, the physical exhaustion, the moral injury, and the drain on the imaginative reserves that are the costs of a side gig. They describe the way that writing itself can serve as a form of spiritual recovery from the labor that funded it. They also detail the satisfactions of service work and manual toil, employment outside the cosmopolis, and mastering skill sets more material than putting words to paper. The forum, I hope, serves as a partial history of the hidden labor that makes possible the poems, stories, essays, books, and periodicals you read—including the magazine you currently hold in your hands.
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