最近看到王迪詩分享她考慮不再做全職作家的原因：稿費「每月僅數百港元」，身體因兼職做出版而累壞。

我不禁想到自己的情況。蘋果日報還在的時候，是我寫作收入的高峰期。我每寫一篇專欄有1,000港幣的回報，每週寫兩篇，一個月總共有8,000。 另外，在明報每兩週寫一次專欄，每次有400，每月所有從寫作來收入加起來8,800。也就是說，如果我單靠寫作，哪怕是住劏房，也沒法維持生活：劏房租金5,000，每天的開銷也就100多一點，在香港這個昂貴城市怎麼活？何況蘋果已不在，我明報的專欄也被停止（我沒被告知原因）。

幸好我能靠教英文寫作維生，如果單靠寫作，最壞情況是給香港政府打工，做寫英文新聞稿之類的工作…

之前有個學生給我這個寫作題目：“Unrequitted Love” （沒有回報的愛）。我立刻想到了我的寫作事業，一動筆就不假思索地寫下此文：

 

Unrequited Love

Last year, as soon as “Maestro” came out on Netflix, I raced to watch it, because Carey Mulligan was playing Leonard Bernstein’s wife, and everything she appears in I watch.

Mulligan’s performance was a revelation all right, but there was something else in the film that immediately struck me and has stuck with me ever since. Bernstein is already famous when he remembers his first break. Without it, he muses, he would be still “teaching piano little eight year-olds who complain.”

Boy how that remark stung! Have I not been teaching writing to children instead of working on my own writings? Granted, I’m luckier than the Bernstein who had to put up with pesky kids, in that I’ve managed to spread my love for writing to most my charges.  Still, it upsets me that I’m not spending the bulk of my time and energy writing. Just before I took on teaching to supplement my income from writing, I was already telling friends “even if I manage to be one of those star tutors who can earn lots, I’d still consider my life a failure if I don’t write.” Now that I’m earning a comfortable living from teaching, unsurprisingly, I derive little pleasure from my improved material circumstances. Not writing fills me with such self-loathing, because I’ve been told I write well so many times that I’m convinced if I don’t write, I’m not living the life I’m meant to live.

One of favourite writers Joan Acocella is no stranger to unfulfilled artistic potential. When she moved to New York as a young woman, she was certain that many of the brilliant young artists she encountered there would go on to have thriving careers. Time was to prove her wrong. “Over time, our group lost many of its members—to bad divorces, professional disappointments, cocaine,” she recounted in a book that was published when she was in her 60s. “The ones who survived combined brilliance with more homely virtues: patience, resilience, courage.”

My first professional disappointment occurred when the founder of a well-known newspaper in Hong Kong briefly considered hiring me as a columnist, but baulked when he noticed  I like to use “I” in my pieces,  and I wasn’t prepared to change my style for his outlet. That incident didn’t affect me much, but going forward, if rejections happen again and again, will I be able to sustain my love for a vocation that not only doesn’t pay me but also doesn’t seem to love me back? I hope the answer is yes.