This Writing Life: Why Socio-Economic Inclusion is Important.

Let’s begin to recognise the emerging challenges we face more collectively.

Following my article The Truth About Writing Nobody Else Wants To Tell You which resonated with very many people (thanks for the messages), here is a little more on theme, before I move on.

Let’s cut the crap and get straight to it. The facts about writing, publishing and the broader creative industries.

Firstly, the bit many whisper, but don’t raise their voices about. The literary industry is still overwhelming run by highly privileged posh people who went to private school and live in expensive postal code areas of London. They have command and control over the publishing industry.

While some of these people are very nice people. Too often it’s an industry that largely serves its own.

The typical British author today is often female, white, privately educated, and upper middle class. Thus, simply replacing the male, white, privately educated, and upper middle-class prior archetype. While positive in a singular sense, if we are truly honest, we have made little progress.

Ideally there would not be an archetype, just many great writers of talent and hard graft. For many, there are far more barriers to entry to opportunity than for the current and prior connected archetypes. I genuinely feel there can be progress in a better direction.

Today, a small cluster of very similar people still hold almighty power over what voices get investment, advances, development opportunities, get published, gain income via writing, gain the opportunity to write professionally, to potentially forge the holy grail of writing careers. Too small a sample of society are leading and managing an entire industry.

The key problem is the industry’s audience and potential broader incremental audience is not represented by the people who hold power over whether a story gets published or not.

There is still a trend of over indexing on selecting voices from within a similar socio-economic group, tokenism is a failing that works against both genuine equality and efforts to assist in strengthening an already frail and threatened industry – increasing opportunity to expand its market potential and readership.

Inclusion efforts, while certainly welcome in my view of course, have not gone far enough in being representative of the aforementioned broader potential readership and let’s not forget, the potential viewership market – authorship and book publishing depend on IP and rights management; TV and film plays a large part in its income stream potential.

There are huge missing gaps in the power bases of representation, publishing and commissioning. In 2024 the creative industries more broadly, when compared to the last fifty years, have never been so socio-economically underrepresented by people with lower socio-economic backgrounds; the working and lower middle classes. To repeat from a previous article I wrote; working class representation in the arts and creative industries is a half what it was in the 1970s. We have gone backwards. The signs of regression have been present over the last two decades.

That’s a bigger problem, because the net result of such is that a large degree of cultural output will very likely be unrelatable, misunderstood and overlooked, missing from the public domain and the shelves of book shops, libraries and device screens. The 1960s to the early 2000’s were the only time in human history that working and lower middle classes had voices on mass in the cultural avenues of publishing, media, entertainment and art; the first time many had chances of higher education and access to scaled industry development funding to forge creative and artistic careers. The effect of the internet has without doubt devalued creative output. I’ve written before about how mass IP infringement set a precedence. Revenues have shrunk for the creative ecosystem. Incomes dropped. Development investment has fallen. Creative career opportunity is more challenging than ever before since the post war mid-point of the 20^th century.

We seem to be returning to a period where most people forging successful careers in the creative industries are born of privilege, having the means to support themselves, invest and fund their creative efforts, being able to pay for their accommodation and bills in the early years while dedicated to their craft. This is the age of the internship, where our adopted Americanisms have meant that only rich kids get the breaks. What 21-year-old can afford to live in London in 2024 to complete their internship, often unpaid, commonly low paid? Only rich kids. Furthermore, the creative industries seemed to have abandoned their responsibilities here, because its leadership are so out of touch with the rest of society. Largely they are not representative of it. They are detuned to realism, zero-hour contracts, NHS waiting lists, mass unemployment and the cost of living. They don’t have family members at food banks. While many of us do.

I was talking to the editor of a highly respected cultural magazine last week, who confirmed for me the extent of the problem. Most younger musicians and artists showing great talent, and doing great work, are still living in their hometowns, often at their parents because they cannot afford to move out. Thirty year olds still sleeping in their childhood bedroom, in places such as Newcastle, Hull, and Norwich; where once their kind communed, met, collaborated and thrived in London. London has become a cultural wasteland compared to preceding post war decades, reflected in the loss the music venues, clubs and social meeting points, to be replaced by flat developments owned by foreign investors and rented to tech workers, sterile office complexes, boutique shops, and giant digital advertising hoardings for products most people cannot even dream to afford over looking the ghosts of the London Astoria and Soho. We are on the precipice of further growing inequality due to several emerging global issues, economic factors, and agendas fuelled by the will of certain powerful progressive tech capitalists and broader collaborators.

Beyond creative industry leadership misjudgement and harbouring of nepotistic cliques, the ruthlessly aggressive agenda of ultra libertarian tech bros have savaged the creative industries, beginning with the emergence of enterprise built on mass IP infringement. An alarming amount of tech’s most powerful figures want to see the reduction of the state, law, taxation, and regulation. Their agenda is a world run and governed my big business, markets and the will of billionaires – marketing monoculture and the dismantling of democracy. New feudal overlords and subservient masses, divided and conquered, plugged into the branded mainframe for whatever twisted purposes they want us to serve. Fuck that.

In the present climate, for most artists and writers, are we headed toward a return to the days of relying on the slim opportunity from a few artist benefactors – and at what cost to artistic license and creative freedom when successful? The fact social media influencers are considered ‘creatives’ by mainstream culture is shocking – mere mouthpieces for product consumerism, corporate brands and crypto scams.

The creative ecosystem depends on a healthy creative industry.

Back to the headline. Creative people with talent of all disciplines have never found it so tough to create a living wage income, comparative to the last 50 years or more. The battered creative industries need renewal and innovation. We are at an inflexion point. Creative industry leaders and decision makers need to better represent society and market potential, moving beyond traditional cliques. Furthermore the creative industries need to be better at change management and business acumen agility. This is the perfect time for upstarts and disruptors with creativity at the heart of their enterprise. Don’t let me drag out that music industry example again; book publishing, audio production, TV and film, cannot be allowed to go off the cliff too. Please, let’s do better, before it is too late.

The compulsion to write and create in multiple forms still burns bright for so many of us. It feels like the reason we are here in the world. Balancing our work of passion is essential, alongside a full-time job, or multiple jobs. Many regrettably give up all together to simply survive, pay bills and recover from the working week – don’t, keep carving out time, even if it’s only an hour a week at first. Creativity is an important part of who you are; it helps with mental health and sense of identity too – believe me, I’ve been there, on the edge – living for other people’s agendas, fight back, carve back time for what is important for you, essential for a more fulfilling life.

If we don’t begin to more actively recognise the source of our problems, then how can we ever fix them?  The creative industries need to take an honest look at themselves to begin to embrace their full potential and act.

Let us begin to recognise the greater collective challenges most of us all face. Recognising the need for socio-economic inclusion is the starting point. We together are a greater and more powerful community recognised in numbers rather than by siloed factions.