Not everyone has time
on their hands. Not everyone has the luxury of patience in this vast,
interminable world. Not everyone’s plate is full. Not everyone has or rather
can afford to reserve time for others, and even if they could they end up giving
up what they could have done for themselves. That’s blunt, but the truth is
nothing but blunt. As such it’s remarkable, monstrous, and even astounding, to
see how those who get impatient at the slightest jolt in their schedules expect
others to have hours and days of freedom on their hands.
Let’s get this straight. Freelancers aren’t free. They can
write for hours and hours on some vague, confused topic and make it clear for the
benefit of the reader, but they expect (as they should) some form of
compensation. There are reasons why newspapers are missing out on good writers
nowadays, after all, and one reason clearly is the way creative writers are
being underwritten. Now “underwritten” is a strong word, but it takes a strong
word to drive home an unpleasant point, so I will restate what I said: those who
write and take away from their schedule even two hours of their time must be
paid or in some way compensated.
Because compensation
isn’t a privilege, it’s a birthright. By dedicating hours to a computer to
type up an article you had to research for, you’re doing the publisher or
editor a favour. The “exposure argument", which the above cartoon so
brilliantly debunks, can get you only so far. Exposure isn’t going to pay through
your rent, taxes, food, and married life. The argument will be given
by those who sit on comfortable chairs and have everything at their beck and
call. They get big bucks, we don’t. If that isn’t exploitation or deception, I
don’t know what is.
In the West the freelancers are unionising. We are behind
them because these freelancers, as
an article in the New Republic points out, are contributors to digital
media. We are behind them because forget our digital media, even our print
media doesn’t pay us at times! Max Rivlin-Nadler, who wrote that article and is
himself a freelancer, admits: “freelancers were never really meant to live
entirely off of their earnings.” True. That makes our situation even more
pathetic when considering how even print-media publishers and editors here
refuse to pay us.
Birthrights shouldn’t be demanded for. They should be
affirmed and accepted by the other party, by default. We don’t want to say “Pay
us”! We want those to whom we write to bring up the subject of payments, to
recognise that we have time on our hands but insofar as we are compensated for
spending money, research, and brainpower on them. “Sri Lanka is a cultural
desert,” Sir Ivor Jennings once observed, and notwithstanding my
anti-imperialist sympathies I am with him there because we keep on rubbishing
creativity and rewarding mediocrity. Even now.
In my experience so
far, the best writers have emerged from outside the newspaper industry. And
why? Because the best writers are fed up. Their salvation, as freelancers at
least, lies in the magazine world or those various unpaid, volunteer sites which
get them more exposure than the printed word. Yes, there was a time when
writers dazzled us with their prose in newspapers – Regi Siriwardena, Ajith
Samaranayake, Rajpal Abeynayake, Malinda Seneviratne, the list goes on but ends
somewhere – but now the best prose stylists either have blogs or write to
magazines. Dhanuka Bandara writes excellently, and he wrote to “The Nation” and
“Ceylon Today”. But “The Nation” closed down and “Ceylon Today”, for some
obscure reason, allowed him to go away. Why?
So to wrap up: don’t write for free. Don’t expect exposure
to salvage you forever. The “exposure argument”, as I mentioned before, will be
given by those who have the luxury of time and money on their hands, who get
paid for the littlest thing they do and who get compensated for the extra mile
they walk. We walk that extra mile too. About time we got recognised.
No, I’m not saying we should get unionised. But we should
assert. That’s a first step. A necessary first step.
No comments:
Post a Comment