ABSTRACT
How do writers and other creative artists shape their working lives? Over the last decade the term the gig economy has been used to describe increasing levels of freelance work and multiple job-holding, particularly amongst university educated workers who might once have been expected to be in secure full-time employment. For those working in the cultural sector, the gig economy is not new. As Bernard Lahire reminds us, writers have often led a ‘double life’, supporting a creative practice through income derived from some other occupation. But for many the writing life involves more than just a double life, with the creative career being constructed more as a portfolio of diverse elements, a mix of creative work, arts-related work, and non-arts work (as research by Throsby and others has shown). Drawing on the literature on work practices in the cultural sector, and my own experience of some four decades of primarily freelance work in creative writing and the visual arts, this chapter will examine the way a sustainable portfolio practice might straddle different disciplinary fields and writing genres. Within the multiple life of the ‘gigging writer’ sustainability might involve looking beyond the key genres of ‘traditional’ creative writing, and managing a mix of creative projects in a way that deals with the divergent demands of experimentation (R&D), reputational development, and income generation.
