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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,
幸好我能靠教英文寫作維生,如果單靠寫作,
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,
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.
Michelle Ng
英國牛津大學畢業,前《蘋果日報》和《眾新聞》專欄作家,現在身在楓葉國,心繫中國大陸和香港。
聯絡方式: michelleng.coach@proton.me
個人網站: https://michellengwritings.com
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