The Internet may have made a writer’s job easier, but it has also made it a lot more difficult to earn a decent living: magazine and newspaper subscriptions are down, online ad revenue lags behind print, yet the cost of living only ever seems to go up. These days a city like London is prohibitively expensive even for well-established professionals, let alone someone at the beginning of their career. This harsh economic reality forces many people, not just young writers, to make tough decisions: do they stay in a city they can’t afford to enjoy, or move somewhere less oppressive? This is an age-old dilemma that has forced generations of city slickers out into dreary suburbs and provincial towns, but in the age of easyJet and globalisation, cheaper doesn’t necessarily have to mean cultural exile. You can move to Berlin like I did, which has allowed me to balance my creative ambitions with the joys of cosmopolitan living.
Berlin’s appeal is obvious: it’s a major European metropolis with a thriving cultural scene and arguably the best nightlife in the world. Yet, at the same time, rent is approximately 57% lower than in London, which has a knock-on effect on the price of everything else. According to Numbeo, costs of living in London are roughly 46% higher than in the German capital. Mind you, pay tends to be lower, but the money you do make goes further and buys you breathing space to develop your career while still having some sort of fun.
While my move to Berlin might look like it was driven by lifestyle, my main priority was actually my career. In any profession pay is largely shaped by talent and experience and most people will see their salaries grow as they accumulate more of the latter. Writers are often forced to supplement their income with odd jobs or perhaps even find unsatisfying career employment then try to forge a career in their free time, sacrificing weekends, leisure and friendships in the pursuit of professional actualisation. There are those that romanticise this, but they’ve usually read too much Bukowski and never really tried to achieve anything creatively. Musician and novelist, Stuart David, once wrote that “there is a myth that says you can work at menial labour and still learn to be an artist in your free time. This is propagated by people who haven’t tried to create anything in the state of mind that way of life engenders.” I wholeheartedly agree with him.
We might mystify the creative process, but it really is like any other job: the more you do it, the better you get at it. Elite footballers are born with innate talent, but relentless practice is what gets them to the top. The more you read, for example, the better you will write. Great ideas take time to ferment and need mental space to grow from an inspirational spark into a fully-formed work – an intense, introspective process that often looks like a lot like idling on the outside but is really anything but. In Berlin there’s less pressure to take a shoddy second job to support yourself, freeing up more time to work on your craft, which is the only way to get better at it.
I think you ought to do an introduceyourself post, if you are writing for unilift a verification of that would get you tones of traction on steemit, :) hope this helps! If it gets you steem rich that would be dope! @tylavision good luck! Much love
Inspiring!