H&M sweater
Wilfred dress (similar)
Aldo boots
CHANEL handbag
Zara sunglasses (similar)
Aurate New York ring (c/o)
Linjer rings (c/o) (similar)
Linjer earrings (c/o) (similar)
Location: Goethe Avenue – Chicago, Illinois
Over the weekend, a long-time reader of Coco & Vera, who has become a friend, sent me a message. It included a picture of a pair of earrings she’d found that she knew were just my style. She asked if I’d like her to send them to me. I gratefully agreed, reflecting on how lucky I’ve been to cross paths with so many thoughtful and generous people. “I get to read your blog for free,” she replied, “consider this a small payment.”
I’ve never seriously considered that anyone might pay to read what I write in this space. The idea that words, written well, have a value belongs to a bygone era. I spent my time at university studying writing, and our professors were careful to set our expectations regarding our future earning potential low. They never said that our words did not have value – in fact, they preached the contrary. But they taught us not to expect that anyone outside of our classrooms would value them, or the years of unremunerated time we all put into developing our craft so that we could ultimately become the writers we are now.
The proof of how right they were confronts me every day of my life. My writing abilities are constantly and consistently acknowledged. But rather than resulting in opportunities to write for a living, they offer me only the opportunity to do more work for free. I am the designated proof-readers for an entire department of people on top of my own job. I am constantly asked to review and edit poorly written documents cobbled together by my peers. My skills are valuable – but that value is never associated with a dollar amount. There is always at least one quite good writer in a large group whose abilities can be relied upon in a pinch every day. Why bother to employ a communications specialist? They would just be an additional expense.
And the thing is, this isn’t new for me. I’ve been proof-reading and editing at no cost since junior high, labouring under the misapprehension that if someone needs my help, I should be willing to offer it. I have thereby undercut the value of my own skills by offering them for free, which leads everyone around me to believe that that is exactly what they are. It’s a trap that I think many, if not all, writers fall into. After all, writing is a hobby, like needlepoint or scrapbooking. It isn’t a skill or a career. Everyone knows that. And it’s because they do that I can’t tell you how many times I’ve told people that I’m a writer, only to have them respond, “Okay, but what do you really do?”
Writing isn’t a real job. As a career path, it is an inadequate choice, even a laughable one. And if you choose it, you not only need to prepare to struggle to be paid for your work. There are more disappointments and frustrations in store. Life as a writer means you will be forced to constantly justify your career choice to strangers who feel compelled to point out what they perceive to be the grave error in judgement you’ve made.
To call it tiresome is an understatement. And yet I can’t blame those people for their individual ignorance. That ignorance is a symptom of our cultural view of writing as something that “anyone” can do simply because pens and paper are readily accessible to all people. As if that was really all it took. As if simple possession of pens and paper made a writer.
I wish it were that easy. I would have saved hours – no, years – of agonising over syntax, sentence structure and simile if that were true.
What I realised this weekend is that while, intellectually, I know the inherent value of good writing, I have internalised the same cultural perception of what writing is worth as everyone around me. That means that I perceive my own work to be of limited value and not worthy of compensation, which is why I was so surprised by the suggestion that someone would willingly pay to access it.
None of this is to say that I’m thinking of instituting a subscription fee for Coco & Vera, because I’m not. I’ve simply realised that I need to place the appropriate amount of value on my work, because no one else will. The fact that I’ve chosen to have a corporate career rather than writing full time is my way of acknowledging that no one else is likely to value my writing enough to pay for it. But if I take their lead and diminish its value in my own mind, I might as well stop typing now.
So thank-you, Gwen. And I don’t just mean for the earrings.
I can only imagine how frustrating that must be – I’m also the resident proof writer/style advisor for many, many people in my life and I’m not an actual trained, professional writer (just a person with a fair measure of experience after 12 years authoring research papers, conference papers, and articles…and that whole book thing) and I find that frustrating sometime.
Courtney ~ Sartorial Sidelines
As someone to whom books are a lifeline and have been since I was a small child, I can only tell you how much I value writers. I believe being able to bring life to words is a gift. Words change our perspective which can then change lives. Words make us laugh or cry or inspire us. I choose to look for the words that uplift. With your pictures and your words, you do that 🙏🏻
Cee! Now that I’m finally back home, I can write you a proper comment. My first impulse was to say something silly, like how we’ve regressed to a caveman-style bartering economy where you post beautiful content on the internet and I pay you in earrings, but… But I mean – just look at your blog. It’s so slick and professional, and you very obviously put in so many hours to keep it that way. You work on it as if you were being paid to do so, when the only payment you get is that other people get to enjoy it and maybe derive a little inspiration from your impeccable style. Though I have to say, I always scroll past the pictures to read the text first, in the style of a child eating their dessert first, and then go look the pictures afterwards.Your style may have been what drew me to Coco & Vera originally, but your writing is definitely my favorite part of it.
Anyway – a lot of the things you describe sound very familiar to me – sadly so. The fact that some of us create things just for the sake of creating them, only to get looked down on because no company / publisher has decided to take a risk and publish our work can be absolutely heartbreaking. People don’t acknowledge the grit it takes, for instance, to self-publish a book and try to promote it, something that a company would have a whole marketing staff dedicated to doing for you. I mean, I once went to a comic-con with sutures in my stomach to sell my work, because I couldn’t let my artist do it on her own – oh, the glamorous life of a writer, eh?
I’ve had a “published creator” pick up an anthology that took months of hard work for myself and four different artists to produce, look at it like it was a flattened A4-sized turd and say, “I wouldn’t pay ten pounds… for this,” before tossing it carelessly back on our table. We’re talking about a guy who wrote a four-page comic strip to fill in the gaps on a monthly kids’ anthology here. Just to put things into perspective. I’ve also had a former collaborator of mine ask me to re-letter a four-issue comic she made years ago, with her older sister – and, when I asked how much the two of them would pay me, the answer was that they’d “decided no money should change hands over this series”. Meaning that me spending hours working on something I had no relationship with was perfectly acceptable to them, since I was “just a writer” – and an unpublished one, at that. So, reading about all that free extra work you do for your colleagues makes me rather annoyed on your behalf – and it makes me think that, now that you’ve got more responsibilities, you also have the perfect excuse to say you don’t have time to do their jobs for them anymore.
Because I guess where I’m going with this is, we work hard at honing our skills, and they do have value. Even if some (okay, a lot) of people don’t see that, it’s true, and it’s something we need to hold on to.
I value your words, always. There are so many bloggers who don’t write, just ramble, and weren’t blogs at their conception, their core, to be about writing? I admit, writers have it tough, anyone who creates does, how do we assign ourselves value? A friend recently asked me to photograph a small wedding (now sadly postponed) and when asked how much I’d charge I said $100, and felt bad about that, because shouldn’t I just do it for free? I do have to wonder, do men struggle with valuing their creative work as much as women do?
Oh and you DO deserve those earrings! Can’t wait to see them!