Someone I barely know recently asked if I’d come round and decorate his kitchen. He’d provide the paint, the brushes, all the coffee and biscuits I could manage, and even a celebratory glass of wine at the end as a thankyou. He knew I loved to paint and he promised to put the word around what a marvellous painter I was.
Actually this isn’t strictly true. What he actually asked was if I wouldn’t mind “cobbling together” a few words as a contribution to some project he’d been commissioned to produce. Oh, and the deadline was months away so no need to rush, take all the time you want…
In my experience “a few words” often mounts up to a thousand or so. I pointed out as patiently as I could that he was asking for three or four hours labour – or even nine or ten if I wasn’t on peak “cobbling together” form that day. And I further explained that if I said yes to every request to produce cobblers for free then it severely restricted my capacity to write the invoiceable cobblers that pays the rent. I offered him something I’d cobbled together a while ago and not really had much wear out of.
The response was a raised eyebrow. It was clear that he now regarded me as a mercenary wretch who, when kindly invited to contribute to a redecoration project which could only result in good things being said about my painting abilities, contemptuously offered an old roll of wallpaper laying around in the cellar.
This kind of unpleasantness is all too common. I think it stems from the popular belief that writing is not real work, not a proper job – unless you are a journalist, or J K Rowling, or the person who types the running commentary on the bottom of Sky News – and that a morning’s anguished clattering at the keyboard is nothing but “cobbling together”, just mucking about. Done for the pure love of words. Please, let us not coarsen the discussion by dragging in mere monetary considerations.
True, I don’t expect to get paid for this. But neither would I expect to get paid for decorating my own kitchen. I do both because I want to (well, not the decoration so much…) For the hell of it. But you wouldn’t expect me to decorate your kitchen without offering some financial incentive, would you?
I should think not. And, to be honest, you would be wasting your money.
But people do regularly assume that you’ll put down everything you are working on (and getting paid for) for the simple pleasure of cobbling together something for their website, product, latest exciting venture.
Of course, this does make me something of a hypocrite. The Culture Vulture would not exist without extracting surplus literary labour from my fellow pen-pushers of the proletariat. Very well, I contradict myself.
And if any of you lot ever fancy coming round and painting the kitchen ceiling there’ll be a whole bottle of wine waiting for you… when you’ve done the second coat, obviously.