Work of Fiction: Making a Living from Writing in the UK explores the lived experiences of fiction writers in the UK and how they make a living. Based on a substantial body of interviews with a range of fiction writers, it considers the ways that writers think about and talk about writing as work and how ‘discourses of writing’ operate to support or undermine them as cultural workers. It argues that discourses of love, luck, magic, and ‘being a writer’ function in complex ways to position writers in enchanted and elevated spaces which both nurture their practice and undermine their status as remunerated workers in the creative sector.
The book shows how the positives and negatives of often precarious cultural work are played out for fiction writers. It has implications for writers in the ways that they think about and talk about themselves as workers, and how the publishing industry values their contributions.