“I’m absolutely not complaining about it”: writing fiction as silenced cultural work

Williams, C (2024) '“I’m absolutely not complaining about it”: writing fiction as silenced cultural work.' In: Morrison, J and Pedersen, S, eds. Silenced voices and the media: who gets to speak? Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, pp. 247-262. ISBN 9783031654022

Abstract

This chapter presents findings from qualitative research into how fiction writers make a living in the UK. In particular, it focuses on how a number of aspects of making a living from writing combine to silence writers as cultural workers. There is a growing body of knowledge around what we might term media and cultural work, which highlights issues of precarity and structural inequality. This new research finds that writing is a precarious way to make a living and supports survey findings on writers receiving low incomes. This chapter argues that writers as workers suffer from a lack of agency over career planning and are devalued by a publishing industry which produces them as voiceless and grateful providers of literary content for profit-making. In addition, it argues that writers’ own perceptions of writing as not-work, and the discourses of love and luck they employ when thinking and talking about writing, function in complex ways to position them in enchanted spaces which, nevertheless, exclude the possibility of complaint. In these ways, writers as workers lack both individual and collective voices. This chapter draws on ideas of passionate work and explores how fiction writers in the UK are, despite giving voice to others in their work, lacking a voice as cultural workers.

Item Type:	Book Chapter or Section
Divisions:	Bath School of Art, Film and Media
Related URLs:	https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/9...
Date Deposited:	22 Nov 2024 12:35
Last Modified:	22 Nov 2024 12:35
URI / Page ID:	https://researchspace.bathspa.ac.uk/id/eprint/16698

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