Career Advice for Aspiring Writers

She sat on a bucket in front of the liquor store, a slab of a woman holding a wriggling, white puppy under one arm and a stained coffee cup in her other hand. It was a warm day for February, but windy, and she’d pulled the hood of her grey sweatshirt so far forward her face was in shadow.  As I approached, she called out to me with the monotonic delivery of a six-year old in a school play.

“Got any spare change? I’ve got two kids at home. Can you help me out?”

I don’t give money to beggars; my time in India taught me it’s not a useful form of charity. I told her sorry and commented on the cuteness of the puppy.

“It’s not mine,” she said with the same flat delivery. “Just a couple of quarters would really help.”

I shook my head and said sorry again. She shifted her apathetic attention to the next person approaching the liquor store and repeated her rote pitch.  

A few years ago, I stepped over a man on a crowded sidewalk in San Francisco. He was sleeping with his body positioned in such a way passersby had to step over him or step off the curb to get around him. At the small of his back nestled a grubby paper coffee cup, one of those blue ones with a white crenellated pattern circling the rim, half full of coins. On the cup, he’d taped a piece of paper that read: NEED MONEY FOR DRUGS AND BOOZE.

She had that same carelessness about her, that same disdainful disregard of the people she begged from. We were a job to her, and a boring one at that. I looked into her cup and saw, with no surprise, a meager scatter of coins that didn’t even cover the bottom. With an attitude like that, she was easy for me to walk away from, especially since she was better dressed than I was in my raggy-hem jeans and the ski-jacket I bought for five dollars at the Salvation Army thrift store seven years ago. Her sweatshirt had that almost crispy, never-washed look. Her jeans, and this did surprise me, had pressed creases like dress slacks.

As I entered the liquor store, I saw a familiar face coming through the exit door, a whiney woman who begs in the doorway of an empty storefront on main street. She staggered under the weight of a clanking bag, at least eight bottles of something, which made me wonder how much she’d made that day.

I bought my  bottle of scotch and left the store. The hooded beggar still squatted on her bucket. Forgetting she’d tapped me before, she gave me her deadpan spiel again.  As I passed her, I glanced into the cup and was shocked to see at least four toonies. (For my non-Canadian friends, a toonie is a two dollar coin. They’re quite distinctive, large with a brass centre and a silvery edge, impossible to mistake for anything else.) In the ten minutes I’d been in the store, this woman had made a minimum of eight dollars, probably much more.  

I am a writer. I spent at least five hours a day (usually more), at least five days a week (usually more), writing my first novel.  From the first word of the first draft to the last word of the last draft, it took eighteen months. Because I am one of the statistically-anomalous writers whose book got picked up by a big six publisher, I got an advance, and quite a generous one. (Some of this went to my awesome agent, April, who deserves every penny.) Adding in the time I will spend promoting the book (things like developing my website, writing this blog, social networking , and if I’m lucky, doing signings and interviews when the novel comes out next June), when the dust settles, unless the book earns out its advance (most don’t), I’ll have done all this work for just under five dollars an hour.

To  summarize:

BEGGAR - at least eighty dollars an hour for sitting on a bucket holding a used Styrofoam coffee cup and someone else's dog.

BREN - almost five dollars an hour for beating the shit out of a thirteen-hundred-dollar laptop with a busted backspace key.

Choose wisely my aspiring friends.