"I worked for half a cent a word. I'm not a fast writer to begin with, so for the first few years I had do other things"
About this Quote
Half a cent a word is a joke with a punchline you can live in. Jack Vance compresses an entire economics-of-art memoir into a single dry shrug: the world valued his sentences so cheaply that writing, by itself, couldn’t be a life. The candor is almost weaponized. He doesn’t romanticize “paying dues,” and he doesn’t grandstand about purity. He just reports the rate, admits he wasn’t quick, and lets the arithmetic do the humiliating work.
The quiet subtext is that speed and value are often misaligned in literary labor. “I’m not a fast writer” isn’t self-pity; it’s a statement about craft. Vance’s fiction is famously ornate and exacting, full of baroque diction and hard-edged social comedy. That kind of prose can’t be mass-produced without turning into mush. So the sentence becomes a small defense of deliberateness in a market that rewards volume, not vision.
“For the first few years I had do other things” lands as an ellipsis of survival: odd jobs, hustles, the unglamorous scaffolding behind a career that later looks inevitable on a book jacket. It’s also a subtle rebuke to the myth that genius naturally rises. Vance reminds you that talent is not a business model, and that the golden age of pulp and magazines still ran on exploitative rates. The line’s power is its refusal to beg for sympathy. It’s the kind of hard-earned irony only a working writer can afford.
The quiet subtext is that speed and value are often misaligned in literary labor. “I’m not a fast writer” isn’t self-pity; it’s a statement about craft. Vance’s fiction is famously ornate and exacting, full of baroque diction and hard-edged social comedy. That kind of prose can’t be mass-produced without turning into mush. So the sentence becomes a small defense of deliberateness in a market that rewards volume, not vision.
“For the first few years I had do other things” lands as an ellipsis of survival: odd jobs, hustles, the unglamorous scaffolding behind a career that later looks inevitable on a book jacket. It’s also a subtle rebuke to the myth that genius naturally rises. Vance reminds you that talent is not a business model, and that the golden age of pulp and magazines still ran on exploitative rates. The line’s power is its refusal to beg for sympathy. It’s the kind of hard-earned irony only a working writer can afford.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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