The compensation battle cry

I have to admit my empathetic imagination is failing me here. I suppose people who aren’t artists assume that being one must be fun since, after all, we do choose to do it despite the fact that no one pays us. They figure we must be flattered to have someone ask us to do our little thing we already do.

Are you making too much money?: Lots of digital copy is spent discussing writing for free online. But what about those who are making too much to turn their back on it for a writing career? It happens. In an interview this week with Canada’s National Post, novelist Rupert Thomson discussed always being on the cusp of more celebrity, and how he finally made the leap to full-time writing:

And yet, ever since giving up a career in advertising in the mid-’80s (“I was making too much money,” he tells an astounded uncle in his 2010 memoir, This Party’s Got to Stop), Thomson has been driven by telling stories: “I feel pointless if I don’t write.”