Zilch

On not getting any funding, funding's looming presence, and doing it anyway

I make a living as a freelance author, literary translator and creative writing tutor. I've been fully freelance since 2014.

Working freelance is the only way I can work, and the only way I want to work, but I don't make a lot of money doing it. I don't want to make a lot of money, I just want to be able to survive, and I'm lucky that I'm published, commissioned and booked regularly. I get by, and I love my work.

However, every time I've thought about applying for funding, I've been overwhelmed by imposter syndrome, the kind that I'm always trying to reassure students they can push through.

Up until last year, I'd applied for funding once, in 2017, and I got it, a cheque arriving out the blue in the post. But then I stopped, I talked myself out of it every time: why do you think you deserve that money? Why should you as a writer get 'free' money?

After interviewing Catherine Lacey at the LRB Bookshop last summer, I was telling her about my aversion to applying for funding and she gave a mini impassioned pep talk about how people need to just apply, how someone else is going to get it if you don't try, she wrote a Substack post in a similar vein.

I wasn't sure at that point whether I would keep writing, whether it was time to stop as I've been finding it harder and harder to juggle paid work with books I want to write. But after this final push, I decided to snap out of it and use the time I would have spent writing articles (that I really wanted to write, but for which I would get £50-150 a pop) to apply for funding.

I applied for funding outright, and well-paid work placements: the Royal Literary Fund Fellowship, the Arts Council R&D fund, the Society of Authors authors awards, and a university job.

It's a week today since I found out that I didn't get any of them.

Here's what I could have won:

Royal Literary Fund Fellowship - two years (academic years) of well-paid university-based teaching helping students with their written work 2 days a week which would have allowed me to write two more books - worth total ~£32k (no interview)

Society of Authors Authors' Grant, towards writing my second novel - £3.5k

Arts Council - time to research and develop an idea for novel number 3 through a residency, reading time, writing time, travel and accommodation for archival research/residency, days spent making field notes in different locations, mentorship from 1-2 more experienced writers in the genre I want to write in - £12k (decision came 6 weeks later than they said it would - feedback totalled ‘there were better applications / application lacked ambition’)

A fixed-term full-time researcher job at a university for three years researching creative-critical writing, which is my specialism - ~40k a year (no interview)

Though I was applying for specific projects, in reality this funding would have actually been used to fund multiple of my projects simultaneously - it's finite money for finite time, but I would have squeezed it for every drop. When I have had writing funding, I have previously used it very strictly for a project, or to do the above.

What I have previously 'won' -

Society of Authors Authors' Grant - towards writing the first draft of Vehicle - £3,500 in 2017, where I really did use the money to spend 6 weeks on a residency in Zurich very dedicatedly writing the first draft of the novel

A fully-funded PhD which gave me a monthly stipend for 3 years in order to write Fair (50%) and a thesis (50%) during which I also finished writing Vehicle, wrote Dust Sucker and wrote Goblinhood - ~£35,000-36,000 in total across 2019-2022

So, because I didn't get any funding for my next books, does that mean I won't be writing them? Of course not. Most of what I've written was completely unfunded apart from work. It just means that I will write these books in between more than full time work (as I have done up to this point). It means that the meagre savings I've accumulated over the last year will be used for a period of rest after a multi-year period of burn out and to work on the next drafts of novel 2, for which I've had a first draft ready the last 3 years. It means that it might take me many years to write the next book/s, rather than one or two.

Funding is useful because of the delayed-pay nature of literary fiction. It's not money for nothing, no matter what I say to myself at my lowest points. It takes time to write a book, no matter how much experience and skill you might have.

Advances are getting lower, are now sometimes nothing more than a token, even more so for genres and types of writing, like mine, that are hybrid and experimental because they're deemed a risk. There is a small pride in being unfundable, when I'm feeling whimsical. Most of the time though...

It's not like salary-based work where every thought and block is funded while work is being done on something that might fizzle out or end up being something incredible. It's working for free or practically for free while also working another job full time to then, eventually, months or years later, reveal something that someone will hopefully go 'oh, yes, that's good, I'll take it from here'.

You then get a small payment with more over the next few years, or a big payment and even more down the line if you're especially lucky. But you might burn out before you reach that stage. You might feel so dejected and depleated that you just carry the idea around with you till it wears away to dust.

Creativity cannot come down to institutional funding and validation, and it shouldn't be rushed or changed for the sake of others' expectations. This won't stop me writing books, or the way I write books, it just means it might have to continue to be very slow, or done in intense bursts, but I've done OK that way so far.

I will keep applying for things. I've just applied for a residency to write another short story collection. Fingers crossed. But it will happen, any which way.