Gen X Was the Last Generation to Believe We Could Be Writers

Anna David looks back on an era when publishing still paid.

Today’s guest essay comes from Anna David, NYT bestselling author and founder of Legacy Launch Pad Publishing.

In 1991, it made sense that Condé Nast would come to your college to recruit.

It even made sense that the first thing you did, once you met them, was take a typing test. If it was sexist—and it was, because out of the dozen people you knew who took the typing test the same year you did at Condé Nast, 100% of them were women—you did not notice.

It made sense that you wanted to work for Condé Nast because they owned all the magazines you cared about, and even some you were too unsophisticated to care about yet. It made sense because you wanted to be a writer, and back then, writers started their careers working for magazines.

Going through these actions and eventually landing an internship at the non–Condé Nast–owned Mirabella magazine (after not getting hired at Vogue, despite having aced the typing test) also made sense. It made the same amount of sense as going through the Morgan Stanley trainee program, like many of your (male) friends from college.

It made sense because back then, you believed you could make it as a writer, and making it implied being paid enough money to live—perhaps eventually even well!

After Mirabella, you were hired at a then brand-new magazine called Entertainment Weekly. Though you were again an intern, EW paid its interns an almost livable wage. EW also threw huge staff parties at nightclubs, hosted all-company retreats that interns were invited to, provided generous expense accounts, and was essentially living so large that the fact that it’s now gone doesn’t surprise you.

Writing was not only a way to make a living but also, to you, a very glamorous way to make a living. Because you were not only a burgeoning cocaine addict but also a bit shallow, Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis were your idols, and you believed that being a writer involved a lot of drug and cigarette ingesting, hanging out at the Odeon, and getting fired from jobs.

(You did end up doing all those things eventually, but none of it was glamorous. Or lucrative.)

When Candace Bushnell sold a book of her Observer columns as a book of essays that was then made into the seminal TV show of its time, you were even more convinced that pursuing this writing thing was the right idea.

You thought this even when the first agent you met with told you not to write a book of essays the way Candace Bushnell had, because in book publishing, you should compare yourself to the rule and not the exception.

You listened to his advice, and so your first book wasn’t a book of essays but a novel that was based so much on your life that HarperCollins actually invented a new genre for it called “reality fiction.”

Still, you did not take his advice after that book was acquired, because you kept comparing yourself to the exception. You also didn’t take it when it came to your second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth books.

You refused to hear back then that the real exception was when a book was successful at all, let alone a runaway success made into a hit TV show. People surely told you that, but you only heard what you wanted to.

In the early 2000s, back when you went to fabulous events, you attended the launch party for Bruce Wagner’s book I’m Losing You. As you were walking up to Bar Marmont, Candace Bushnell was coming out, looking far more glamorous than you in her sky-high Manolo Blahniks. And then she tripped and fell, right there on Sunset Boulevard. Perhaps you should have noted this as a harbinger of sorts.

You did not.

The publishing business was shrouded in mystery back then, and it remained shrouded in mystery until 2022, when a lawsuit brought out into the open the fact that 85 percent of books don’t earn out their advances. It was during this lawsuit that Markus Dohle, the former head of Penguin Random House, casually admitted that the name Random House made sense because book success is so random.

By then, making a living as a writer was a bit of a funny joke. You trace the end of the era to the arrival of Huffington Post, when you saw that Alec Baldwin had written an essay for it. This was before HuffPo, as it came to be known, stopped paying writers at all for their contributions. Maybe the Baldwin news was the hint of things to come, of a time when celebrities would take over the job of pretty much all entertainment journalists.

Writing and podcasts, for most of us, became volunteer work. Or, more accurately, work we paid to do. We were sold on paying to do this because it was brand building. And the smart writers understood this early—they focused on building their brands rather than building their writing careers, because while they couldn’t make a living from writing anymore, they could very much make a living from building businesses off their brands.

You didn’t understand that early, but you did come to understand it before it was too late.

Understanding it sometimes makes you feel crass because it means admitting—and in fact publicizing—the fact that writing is less art and more commerce.

When you first realized this, a friend accused you of selling out.
You were hurt but also looked at the facts: you were making a living doing your writing as commerce. This friend was not.
He’s still your friend. You’re still making a living doing your writing as commerce. He still is not.

You now see that you were part of the last generation that believed it could make a living as a writer.
You were delusional to think so—not because you were unlucky but because you didn’t look at history, at the fact that great writers like Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf paid for the privilege to publish.

Gen X has been categorized as the “ironic” generation. As a writer who once made a great living just writing, you now know how accurate that is.