Prince Edward County Writers' Festival
Well, I’m just about to leave for Picton, and I couldn’t be happier. It’s a lovely part of the world. And a great event.
There’s an article about the festival in The County Weekly News.
Click here to read the article.
So the panel I’m on will be asking the question “Why bother to write?”
Good question.
When you start out you’re just really excited to be writing, to see if you can do it, to see what you come up with. It’s a labour of love, not a career move. And I loved writing this novel. It was like a wonderful hobby, something I could do a couple of hours a day. But there’s a kind of shift that happens when you get published. It’s much more time-consuming. It sort of becomes a full time job. You start writing a new book, but you’re editing the first book, and then promoting it, and maintaining a website, and blogging, and doing interviews and readings and festivals etc. All of which is good fun. But for me at least, so far, there isn’t much money in it. So it starts to feel like a bit of an expensive, self-indulgent hobby, and you wonder how long you can afford to keep doing it. Expensive in that you are not working at something else that pays.
There’s an artistic side to it, and there’s a business side to it. The artistic side is wonderful, it’s like play; the business side is tough. When you’re writing that first book at home, you don’t really know what it’s like to actually be a working writer. You might imagine that you spend your couple of hours a day, send it off to your agent and your publisher takes it from there, and you go on to the next book. But it’s not like that. A lot is expected of writers these days. Writers seem to have to jump through hoops to get readers. Writing is only part of it.
And then the question arises in your mind—what should my next book be about? And you do ask yourself, what could I write that will sell really well, so that I can afford to keep on writing? But no one can answer that question. So every book has to start as a labour of love, as an artistic endeavour. And then it turns into a commercial product, one that may or may not do well.
I will always write because of the artistic side of it; I may not be able to write as much as I would like because of the realities of the market, and I’m afraid that’s true for most Canadian writers. It’s very hard to make a living.
But I’m going to enjoy all of it, because it really is the best thing I’ve ever done.
— Shari Lapeña