Susan Johnson's blog

What a strange business it is, page proofing a book. The hard work is done (the writing that is — I always find editing easy in comparison. I am ruthless: cut, cut, cut). For the first time you are able to see the book as a reader might see it: it is recognizably a book now, with page numbers and all laid out, a meal ready to be eaten.

Mostly I am happy enough by this stage. I have gone through the grief of understanding that I will never write like Fitzgerald (THE GREAT GATSBY is still one of my markers of greatness), or not even like the sublime Marilynne Robinson. I will never write like anyone else but S Johnson.

Sometimes this thought cheers me up. I think of that line by one of those blokes (Norman Mailer I think it was) who said that everyone who makes a book is adding another brick to the house. I like to think of myself as a worker in that house of art, making a brick. I like to think that even though I will never be Fitzgerald or Robinson, there is some kind of honour in going on, against the odds, against the poverty of this business, against the bean-counters in the publishing houses, against the odds of ever selling more than thirty thousand copies.

Instead of being disheartened by news of my fellow workers in the house selling 200,000 copies (yay Christos! 200,000 I believe in the UK alone!) I find myself — after almost thirty years and eleven books — strangely happy with my job in the brick-making line. I am now working full-time in journalism because as a single-parent with full fiscal responsibility for my children I need to. I am now saved from the dreadful nail-biting, humiliating uncertainty of waiting to hear back from an agent about whether a publisher wants to buy your book, like another friend of mine is doing at the moment, a brave, courageous fellow worker in the house who I know will keep going on.

I remember not so long ago I was speaking to someone about a job, and she said that she was sorry, the pay wasn’t nearly as good in Brisbane as a similar job might attract in Sydney or Melbourne and, really, $110,000 a year was peanuts, she knew. $110,000!!! That is about ten years worth of income for most fiction writers out there!!! More!!! Twenty!!!

So — as I proof read MY HUNDRED LOVERS today, I’d like to send a big shout out to all those workers out there making bricks, all those writers who are doing it for peanuts — REAL peanuts — and without whom no agent, no publisher, no editor, no marketing bean-counter, would have a job. Writers, I salute you! Writers, take a bow!