4. The One About Money
Don't fool yourself.
There will be many about money.
Ways I’ve earned money so far in 2024:
Wine bar. Texas minimum wage is $7.25; my hourly wage before tips is $3; I average $20-25 dollars an hour, with the worst shifts yielding $30 total and the best shifts yielding $300 or more. I work 3-5 shifts per week, ie between 25 and 40 hours. I work more when I’m feeling worried about money; I work less when I’m worried that my writing is getting neglected.
Play-by-mail. I recently self-produced a play I’ve been working on for a few years, one designed to be performed at home by a pair of subscribers. Scripts arrive via mail once a week for six weeks. Fifteen households signed up, and most paid the $50 ticket fee. (I gifted one subscription, made a trade for another.) After ink, paper, postage, and a few inevitable errors in budgeting (given this is my first time doing this kind of project), I made $57.
Developmental commission. I answered a call put out in December by a small NYC theatre company for play pitches; I found out in January that mine was one of three chosen and I got $500 for it. This $500 is to support me actually writing the play I pitched to them, after which we meet to discuss whether there is mutual interest in their company producing it.
This Substack essay series. (…I’m suddenly feeling that I don’t want to tell you the statistics for this publication. What if there are wildly fewer subscribers than you imagined? Will it make you question my legitimacy? Will you read with more skepticism?) This is my fourth month sending out this newsletter. I have 50 subscribers. 18 of them are paid. After Substack’s fees, I get about $5.60 per month per paid subscriber, so in 2024 so far I’ve made right around $300 from this publication.
So.
What conclusion, you wonder, am I trying to lead you to here?
Are you supposed to feel impressed by these numbers? Or sorry for me? Is this a long-winded pitch to get you to give me money for some project or another?
None of the above. I don’t know how these numbers compare to what you would have imagined about my bank account or income streams, were you to take the time to imagine them. I share these specifics because I think they’re interesting, and a bit vulnerable. And because, if we’re going to talk about the conversion of time or value into money, it’s useful to be specific.
A few months ago my partner, Rory, and I had a conversation with his parents where I quipped that Rory aims to be “career free.” We all laughed, both because that sounds like an illogical thing to aim for and because it rang true. (Though actually, Rory has had a career — what’s closer to the truth is that, after spending his 20s building a business out of his art practice, he is now moving towards yet another interest that doesn’t seem easy to monetize.)
That conversation has been periodically resurfacing in my mind, perhaps because the suggestion, however joking, that having a career could be undesirable shook loose a little something in my brain. Not that I don’t desire a career — I do, quite fervently. But whether or not the work I’ve chosen — ie playwriting — has the potential to be a career is an open question.
I find that most people outside the arts continue to believe in some level of reciprocal logic between art and the market. I think (correct me if I’m wrong) that the story goes something like this: it’s hard to be an artist, because there are always more people trying to “make it” than there are opportunities available. So there will always be talented people who don’t get lucky/don’t “make it,” but by and large the ones who do make it are both persistent and talented.
There is some truth to this, in a zoomed-in sense. Who gets the grant, who gets the gallery show, who gets the spot in the theatre’s season — this is some combination of talent, access to opportunity, track record, and ability to speak the language of the institution giving out the opportunity.
But in a more zoomed-out sense, I see the big pool of artists and the little sliver getting paid quite differently. I think of it more like this: there’s this big pool of kinds of art being made, and there’s a thin sliver of it that gets richly compensated, because that is the art that has found a way to function inside capitalism — that is the art that has been made into a commercial product. This is tv shows, and visual art that people want to buy to hang in their homes. This is the fun Broadway musical you go to for your anniversary or when you’re on vacation to New York City. This is streamable music and best-selling novels. To say these forms are commercial products is not to devalue them or say they’re no longer art (which many of us, bitter, tend to do). There’s infinite nuance in terms of how these products interact with money, how much money has gotten into their bones. We’ve all seen tv shows that are stretched beyond the limits of their (already thin) premises to sell another season, and we’ve all seen tv shows that, despite their hooks and cliffhangers and formulaic moments, maintain a narrative integrity, and offer something that stays with you.
Theatre is, by and large, not a successful commercial product. At least not in America, not in the 21st century. There are essentially no playwrights who make their living just from writing plays. This includes our best and most successful living playwrights, brilliant artists working at the top of their game. If a career is some combination of time, recognition, and compensation, then I know some playwrights who have careers, though mostly because of factors one and two (time and recognition), not factor three. And I suspect there are people in each of those playwrights’ lives who see them as successful more because of the adjacent work they do for money (say, teaching at an elite institution) than because of the plays they’ve made.
Our culture connects value and money so fully that it is actually, on some level, hard to believe something that doesn’t make money is valuable. If tv makes money and theatre doesn’t, then we should just listen to the market and accept that maybe theatre’s not it anymore, right? It’s not how people want to consume stories. Listen to the customer, the customer is always right. (And let’s be honest, a lot of those best and brightest playwrights are making their paychecks writing for tv. Which is, I would claim, part of why tv has gotten so good in the past decade or so.)
I can easily talk myself into this corner, and I have, many times. Insisting on the value of theatre starts to seem like a grandiose delusion. But then I remember that most of my most deeply held values are not reflected by the market. Environmental responsibility, social safety nets and mutual aid — I don’t have any trouble seeing these things as valuable even if they are at odds with profit. So why do I have trouble trusting the value of my craft when it doesn’t make money?
I suppose, according to the market, I have a job — bartending — and a hobby — playwriting. And actually, I like bartending. I’ve had a number of other jobs (grant writing, audio transcription, teaching theatre, teaching English), but mostly I have preferred restaurant work. There are downsides, of course: I don’t make any connections in the theatre industry by doing it, it can be repetitive or depressing, and like any in-person job, it’s not travel-friendly. On the other hand, the hourly pay is better than any of the jobs listed above (sometimes a lot better), it doesn’t involve a major creative or mental investment, and it doesn’t involve sitting alone at a desk, too much of which is bad for my body and my brain. Also, restaurant jobs are by far the part of my life where I’ve made the most friends from different economic and cultural backgrounds. Take a snapshot of any table I’ve sat at for an after-work beer, and I am almost always in the minority in one or more categories: as a white person, as a college-educated person, as a non-immigrant. (This stands in sharp contrast to many of the other jobs, where any cross-class or cross-race relationships have involved me finding myself in a position of often-underqualified authority; the teacher standing in front of a room of Black and brown kids for whom my slim credentials have been deemed sufficient, etc.) A lot of my politics have been shaped around those beer-after-work tables.
I digress, I know, and I will get back to theatre in a minute, before this whole essay veers weirdly into a pro-bartending diatribe. Before I do, I just want to say: all the other jobs I listed above have been seen as more valuable or more “getting on the right track” by the people in my life than working in restaurants. Yet none of them have fed my art making or given me the things I needed outside of art making as well as restaurant work. And the fact is, for the vast vast majority of working artists, a crucial part of being an artist is finding a way to make money that functions as a sturdy foundation for your art-making, something you can do to turn a relatively limited amount of your time into money.
Art highlights just how endlessly arbitrary it is to assign monetary value to one’s time, or even the concrete output of that time. Take this newsletter, for example. For the people who choose to pay, are they paying based on the time it took me to write this, or the product they’re receiving? Seven dollars a month is either a ridiculously high fee for receiving a single email, or a very modest donation to a larger body of work, some of which is reflected in these pages. Similarly, the $500 I received from the theatre company in New York felt, on one hand, like a huge gift considering all I did was pitch them an idea. The money comes with no strings attached — I’m not contractually obligated to ever write the play. But of course I will write the play, and if I were to divide that $500 over all the hours I will spend writing, it starts to look like not much at all.
So if the math is always going to be wrong, and the bulk of your income is always going to com from elsewhere, what’s the point of turning art into (a tiny bit of) money? Should I just give up on art-as-income altogether?
Sometimes money does actually buy me time — time away from the other jobs, or less hours at the other jobs. It can also pay for the art itself — I wouldn’t have produced my play-by-mail if I had to front roughly $600 of my own money to send it out, so even though I didn’t really make a profit on it, charging a ticket fee allowed me to produce it. And lastly, money can function simply as a currency of recognition. Even if it doesn’t pay a single bill, the fact that someone chooses to give me dollars in exchange for words is a puzzle piece in the 3,000 piece puzzle that might eventually come together to reveal a picture called “career.”
Other puzzle pieces include:
a person reading a thing I wrote
a person giving a thing I wrote to their friend to read
a production
a residency
a review, even if it’s a bad one
a person I know coming to my show
a person I don’t know coming to my show
publication
being a finalist for something, even if I don’t get it
another artist wanting to collaborate with me
a person expressing interest in/asking me about my work
being introduced as a playwright by someone in a non-theatre context
a friend who’s in her first year of making a doctor’s salary gifting me a year of therapy
Without getting into the whole subject of a gift economy (perhaps a subject for another time), I’ll just say briefly that this last item on the list points to the idea that work and compensation for work can perhaps exist in a larger and more circular pattern, rather than the direct line the market teaches us. My friend’s gift of the therapy money was, on one hand, a simple act of generosity, but based on years of conversations between us, it also felt undergirded by a value-system that seeks to adjust for the fact that her chosen work is easier to monetize than mine. It felt like an affirmation of value to the choices I was making, rather than the kind of gift that feels like a bail out, or someone being generous to you in spite of your confounding life choices. (My friend can correct me if I’m wrong; she is a reader of this publication.)
Perhaps eventually I will feel clearly and unambiguously that playwriting is my career. But in the meantime, my battle with the word “career” continues to remind me that for many of us, inside and outside the arts, what we do for a living and what we contribute to the world we want to live in cannot always be merged. That we find a way to do both, merging them when possible and resisting that merge when it compromises too much, is the ongoing dance that I think is the real answer to the question, “So what do you do?” I wonder how many people might feel a little more breathing room if we made the language of this dance a little easier to reach for in casual conversation.
Maybe because I mentioned my friend the doctor, I am thinking now about Chekhov, who was famously both a doctor and a writer. It might be foolish to bring up old Anton now, since his bio seems to undercut all my points. How soft and entitled artists today have gotten! Chekhov had a respectable, undeniably useful career and made brilliant art on the side! Why can’t I be more like him?
But I am no longer teaching freshman composition, and this is not an argumentative essay. I am not here to convince you of the different value placed on literary arts in 19th century Russia, or prove to you that I couldn’t be both a doctor and a playwright if I just drank more protein shakes and gave up instagram.
I bring up Chekhov because his career is an interesting one in terms of the slipperiness of art as work, art as play, art as calling. He started writing to make money — short, comedic sketches for the newspaper that he considered silly and unimportant. He claimed to have never spent more than a day on each story. (Later in life, each of his major plays took him a year to write, and he is quoted as bemoaning the days he wrote quickly and with ease, “the way I eat pancakes now.”) It was not unusual for him to support doctoring with his paychecks from writing. He did eventually attract the attention of serious literary editors, who pressured him to abandon medicine, implying that pursuing both paths would result in success in neither. He refused, countering that, like two relationships, time away from one renewed his interest in it. He went through cycles of success and failure with each, and his letters show clearly how these two parts of his life fed each other, how each provided a place to go when he lost hope in the other. I bring up Chekhov to remind myself that art doesn’t always work best when it is a person’s one and only capital-C Career.
Art is work, or at least, art-making is often an all-consuming and spiritually/psychologically athletic process. But sometimes it has to be approached indirectly, or in the middle of the night, or when it least makes sense. Sometimes you have to look at it only out of the corner of your eye. I may argue for art-as-work to be taken more seriously, but when I sit down to face my own blank page, often the only way to begin is to take it less seriously. It’s an impossible paradox. And also, sometimes, a freeing one.