Abstract
Drawing on a seven-year ethnography, we illuminate how unpublished romance writers employed emotional capital to negotiate the competitive publishing industry. To legitimate themselves as “real” writers, aspirants constructed occupational calling narratives, which they then drew upon to manage their emotions when publication was elusive. We call this process “aspirational emotion work” to illustrate how writers made use of their emotional capital to manage their feelings and sustain their identities without knowing if they would realize their dreams. We posit that aspirational emotion work is particularly prevalent among those seeking work in the creative industries, where potential for self-actualization is high but opportunity for secure employment is low.
In recent decades, workers in the paid labor force have increasingly desired meaningful careers that serve as a form of self-expression and self-actualization (Hall and Chandler 2005; McRobbie 2002). This is particularly salient in fields that require a great deal of creativity and skill, those in which individuals generate unique content and then commercialize their intellectual property (Caves 2000; Flew 2012). These creative industries, such as art, music, fashion, software design, film, and publishing, among others, attract a great number of career aspirants because they contain an inherently high degree of artistic expression and therefore provide the potential for self-actualization (e.g., Caves 2000; McRobbie 2002; Menger 1999). 1
Yet because these careers are so desirable and the demand for creative products is so uncertain (Caves 2000), these labor markets contain a glut of job-seekers and a scarcity of positions (Menger 1999; see also Lindemann 2013). As such, compared to workers in other industries, creative workers have a harder time breaking in, though they are often passionately persistent because their identities are so closely tied to the activity (Caves 2000; Menger 1999; McRobbie 2002; Umney and Kretsos 2015). Drawing on seven years of ethnographic research with romance novel writers in the United States, this article shows how unpublished aspirants strove to maintain their identities as “real” writers, a task often complicated by the rejection they faced from the competitive publishing industry. Our analysis reveals that aspiring writers’ struggles were rife with doubt and demoralization, emotions they had to manage in order to persevere toward their dream careers—and identities—as professional romance writers.
Romance fiction is the most widely read literary genre, generating more than $1 billion in annual revenue (RWA 2013; see also Illouz 2014). In fact, sales of romance fiction are so significant that they often subsidize publishers’ less profitable genres, such as literary fiction, nonfiction, and other genres of commercial fiction (Regis 2003). Despite its immense popularity, however, the romance genre has been virtually ignored by social scientists. The extant literature typically focuses on the content of the books (e.g., Clawson 2005; Illouz 2014; Radway 1984), although a smattering of studies examine romance readers (e.g., Brackett 2000; Puri 1997; Radway 1984). Published research on the experiences of romance writers is limited to our previous work (Lois and Gregson 2015) examining how writers managed the sexual stigma of the genre, Radick’s (2016) survey of writers regarding their use of library archives, and Roach’s (2016) autoethnography exploring her simultaneous roles as author, academic, and fan. Since romance authors are the creative professionals whose work sustains the genre that in turn sustains the publishing industry, the dearth of literature examining their careers is a curious oversight.
There is, however, one partial exception. Larson’s dissertation (2017) comprises the only known examination of writers’ careers in the romance genre. Her 2014 survey examined 4,270 romance writers’ earnings over the previous eight years, comparing their incomes via traditional and self-publishing. She found that only approximately 20 percent of her sample earned above the U.S. median income through their writing. This low number is not surprising, as several scholars have documented how difficult it is for writers in other genres to make a living. For example, Kingston and Cole’s (1983) survey revealed the “negligible income” earned by a sample of American fiction, nonfiction, and poetry authors, a finding affirmed three decades later among Australian “fiction, poet[try], nonfiction and academic authors” (Cantatore 2013, 97) and fashion bloggers (Duffy 2016). A few other researchers have tangentially examined writers’ careers as part of their broader samples of artists, finding that creative careers are particularly difficult to break into and sustain, regardless of artistic medium (e.g., Caves 2000; Lindemann 2013). Yet none of these studies has examined the challenges to writers’ identities as they struggle to gain a foothold in the industry. The writers we studied—whether they were unpublished and discussing their present circumstances or published and reflecting back on their days prior to publication—talked at length about the challenges that came with aspiring toward becoming a published author. Because it often took years to obtain a book contract, if it ever happened at all, writers spent prolonged periods in this aspirational phase feeling increasingly discouraged about their prospects, unsure about their talents, and wondering whether they would ever be “real” writers. To persevere, writers had to manage the emotions that threatened to derail their dreams.
Hochschild (1983) defined “emotion management” as the process by which people change their inner feelings or outward emotional displays to reduce the dissonance between what they feel and what they are expected to feel. Whether people manage emotions in their private lives (“emotion work”) or because their jobs require them to (“emotional labor”), their identities are affected; managing emotions is really managing self-in-emotion (Hochschild 1983). Numerous studies have examined how workers’ professional identities are tied to the ways they manage their emotions on the job, with most focusing on how interpersonal issues create the need for emotional labor in service occupations. Less common, however, are studies that have explored how socialization to a professional identity may explicitly involve learning how to handle the emotionally challenging tasks (rather than interactions) in occupations outside of the service sector. Cahill’s (1999) research is particularly insightful in this regard. His ethnography of mortuary science students illustrated the importance of emotions in aspiring funeral directors’ aptitude for the work. Embalming cadavers could be quite disgusting, upsetting, and depressing for students; some were “emotionally suited” to work in these capacities whereas others dropped out of the training program (Cahill 1999, 109). Borrowing from Bourdieu ([1979] 1984), Cahill posited that the students who persevered possessed some form of “emotional capital,” or “system of emotional dispositions” that generated particular “emotional perceptions, reactions, expressions, and emotion management strategies” that their failed classmates lacked (1999, 112). Cahill suggested that people develop different types of emotional capital throughout their lives and as such, it may be a significant factor in “occupational aspirations and selection” (1999, 113).
Lending empirical support to Cahill’s thesis, Schweingruber and Berns (2005) illustrated how the door-to-door booksellers they studied experienced a high rate of rejection and, thus, a great deal of demoralization on the job. Their participants developed the emotional capital to persevere by “emotion mining,” whereby (under the direction of their corporate employer) they selected elements of their pasts, developed useful emotional narratives about their identities, and used them as “emotional bridges” to “connect [their] previous self to the new self that [was] being developed on the job”—a self that could handle the sting of repeated failure (2005, 681). In this sense, Schweingruber and Berns’s work extends Cahill’s by demonstrating how workers may actively develop emotional capital on the job, manage their emotions, and significantly alter their selves. These two studies suggest that emotional capital may play a significant role in helping occupational aspirants marshal the will to persist in challenging industries. The emotions literature, with its heavy focus on interpersonal emotional labor, has largely overlooked this area of investigation.
Intense emotions among occupational aspirants have been examined, however, in the calling literature. Dobrow and Tosti-Kharas (2012, 265) defined a calling as “a consuming, meaningful passion people experience toward a domain.” Though the concept was originally conceived in a religious context, the secular notion of calling refers to “a generalized form of psychological engagement with the meaning of one’s career work” (Hall and Chandler 2005, 160). The discourse of pursuing a career calling is mainstream; workers often talk about the urgent need to find jobs that fit their identities and help them achieve self-actualization (Berg, Grant, and Johnson 2010; Berkelaar and Buzzanell 2015). As such, much of the research on occupational calling has examined psychological effects, revealing, for example, that working in the area of a calling results in the “pleasant psychological states” of “enjoyment” and “meaning” (Berg, Grant, and Johnson 2010, 978) and that the overwhelmingly positive “psychological outcomes” help workers “weather the storm” of “temporary setbacks and failures” (Hall and Chandler 2005, 166). Other studies have uncovered the passionate, personal meanings people achieve through their work. For instance, the zookeepers in Bunderson and Thompson’s (2009, 36) study experienced an attraction to animals that was “in [their] blood” and the pilots Fraher and Gabriel (2014, 934) studied regarded flying as a “drug.” In these respects, occupational callings include intensely positive feelings, descriptions romance writers used when discussing their passion for writing.
Having an occupational calling, however, is a “double-edged sword” (Bunderson and Thompson 2009). Callings can be so identity-driven that people become vulnerable to exploitation, such as overwork and underpay, because relinquishing the work means losing a part of the self (Bunderson and Thompson 2009; Dobrow and Tosti-Kharas 2012; Umney and Kretsos 2015). In addition, people who are prevented from working in the area of their passion may experience devastating identity consequences. This may happen as a result of losing a job in one’s calling, as Fraher and Gabriel (2014) discussed in their research with furloughed pilots. Some of their participants felt “entrapped” by their calling, unable to move on to other occupations, even after waiting years for the airlines to recall them to work. These “stuck” pilots experienced a great deal of anger at their companies for stripping them of their dreams. Other studies have examined the negative effects of “failed” aspirations—of never achieving work in the area of a calling. Given the supply-and-demand dynamics in creative labor markets, it is not surprising that a substantial proportion of this research examines creative workers. For example, Dobrow and Tosti-Kharas (2012) studied aspiring musicians’ receptivity to career advice, finding that the stronger the aspirants’ calling, the less likely they were to heed the warnings of those trying to discourage their career pursuit. Likewise, in their study of educators’ “unanswered” callings, Berg, Grant, and Johnson (2010) found that almost half of their participants identified some type of creative work as the area of missed opportunity and, furthermore, felt regretful and frustrated about it. The romance writers we studied experienced this double-edged sword. On the one hand, they felt the intense emotional pull of their calling; on the other hand, unsuccessful attempts to realize it, particularly in the period leading to their first publication, were highly discouraging.
Given the dual emotional dynamics that often occur in pursuit of a calling, it is curious that the calling literature has only tangentially focused on the emotional capital that may aid aspirants in balancing the lure of the calling with the potential demoralization of failing to achieve it. Though it does not engage the concept of calling, some of the literature on creative careers highlights the strategies artists use to negotiate these emotional tensions. For example, some aspirants who cannot make a full-time living in the arts may resist fully investing in their day jobs so they can maintain a foothold in the artistic world (Lindemann 2013). Other artists may choose steadier, less engrossing artistic work to sustain a stable living, and “scal[e] down their aspirations” to lessen their discouragement at not having achieved to the level of their dreams (Faulkner [1973] 2003, 154). Still others may prioritize their art over financial stability, relying on their passion (and perhaps a financial safety net) to offset the demoralizing unpredictability of the occupation (Umney and Kretsos 2015).
Taken together, these studies reveal that emotions play an important role in creative aspirants’ experience, yet this literature has not analyzed emotions theoretically. If emotions are important motivators for those who are called to a particular occupation, and if the failure to procure stable employment in that occupation has deleterious emotional and identity consequences, it stands to reason that examining how aspirants employ emotional capital may enhance our understanding of occupational callings and aspirational identities.
In the next section, we discuss the setting we studied and the data collection methods we used. We then show that writers working toward their first publication persevered in this competitive environment by constructing a calling and using it as emotional capital to offset the intense demoralization and doubt they experienced while chasing their elusive dream careers. We call this process “aspirational emotion work” to illustrate how writers made use of their emotional capital to manage their feelings and sustain their identities without knowing if they would ever realize their professional dreams. We conclude with a discussion of the ways aspirational emotion work is particularly magnified in the creative industries, where the potential for self-actualization is high but the opportunity for secure, well-paying employment is low.
Setting and Method
The research for our larger project on the experiences of romance authors began in 2009, when the popularity of the Twilight young-adult vampire series sparked our interest in a fiction genre that was new territory for us. We began reading romance in our leisure time, passing novels to each other and discussing our favorite authors. In visiting their websites, we discovered a great deal of advice on how to write commercial fiction 2 (as opposed to literary fiction), as well as many references to the Romance Writers of America (RWA), the national professional trade organization for both published and aspiring romance writers. As a creative release, we tried our hands at writing fiction and began attending the monthly meetings of a local RWA chapter in the Pacific Northwest, where we met dozens of romance writers and learned about their typical career trajectories, the craft of writing genre fiction, and the commercial publishing industry. Our sociological interest quickly prevailed over our talents in creative writing, and we began our research in earnest in spring of 2010.
To be considered a “romance,” a novel must meet two criteria: a love story must be the central focus, and it must include an “emotionally satisfying, optimistic ending,” or what writers call an “HEA”: Happily Ever After (RWA 2013). The romance genre is broken into subgenres, such as historical romance (often Regency-set England), contemporary romance, romantic suspense, paranormal/fantasy romance, young adult (“YA”) romance, Christian inspirational romance, and erotic romance (such as the well-known Fifty Shades of Grey). Though romance novels are stereotyped as highly sexual, the genre varies. Some books include highly explicit content, whereas others “close the door” on their characters’ sexual activity.
While RWA had more than ten thousand members (RWA 2013), it did not collect specific demographic information about them. Larson (2017), however, obtained a 41 percent response rate in her survey of RWA’s membership and found that 98 percent of her 4,270 respondents identified as women. This percentage is consistent with the gender representation we observed at RWA events. Indeed, writers understood the romance community to be almost entirely feminized; on numerous occasions, RWA members told us that romance is “written by women, for women, about women.” Although white women were the most represented group, we encountered women of various racial/ethnic backgrounds in our study, as well as a handful of men.
Romance writers’ socioeconomic statuses and education levels ranged widely; we met just as many women who did not attend college as those with graduate degrees. Although the general public tends to believe that once an author has published a commercial fiction book, she or he can make a career of writing (see Kingston and Cole 1983), we discovered very quickly that this is not true. In fact, we heard from numerous writers that of the ten thousand members of RWA, only a minority are published by traditional publishing houses and even fewer have full-time careers writing romance. 3 Through our many years in the field and countless conversations with authors, editors, and agents, we learned that a large publishing house typically offers a non-bestselling author with modest sales only a few thousand dollars’ cash advance on a book’s royalties. A small number of bestselling authors earn six-figure advances (very rarely more). 4 During the course of our research (2010–2017), self-publishing became a much more accessible alternative to traditional publishing, though rarely did writers make a living via self-publishing only (Larson 2017). Given the limited earning potential as an author, the majority of romance writers we met held day jobs. As forty-something white women who did not make a living writing romance, we fit in easily.
Throughout the course of our research, we attended our local monthly meetings, eight national and regional writing conferences, one national romance reader convention, and several local author events. We joined two romance writer list server, perused hundreds of writers’ websites, followed writers on social media such as Facebook and Twitter, and between us read more than three hundred romance novels. We also participated in the subculture by trying to write romance novels ourselves, which gave us a sense of how difficult it is to plot a story, develop character arcs, and infuse dialogue with subtext. We recorded our observations in detailed field notes and copied thought-provoking website and list server content to electronic files, ultimately amassing several hundred pages of field-note data. Through this “complete membership role” (Adler and Adler 1987), we gained “intimate familiarity” (Blumer 1969) with the subculture of romance writers.
In addition to collecting observational data, we also conducted in-depth interviews with writers and other industry professionals, most in person but a few via phone or Skype, focusing the questions loosely around entry into the genre, goals and career trajectories, writing–life balance, and experiences with the subculture of writers. We both took part in every interview, generally with one writer, although occasionally we interviewed groups of two or three. Interviews lasted approximately one to two hours.
Our interview sample consisted of forty-three writers from all subgenres, ranging from unpublished writers working on their first manuscripts to New York Times bestselling authors, and every level in between. Though heterosexual white women made up the majority of the romance-writers we met, we also interviewed three male writers, eleven writers of color, and three lesbian-identified writers to cover the variety of experiences in the genre that may be influenced by these categories. We also interviewed twelve industry professionals (two of whom were white men and one a woman of color)—acquisitions editors, literary agents, book reviewers, and publicists—to get their perspective on the writer subculture. Our interviewees’ ages ranged from twenty-two to seventy, with most in their forties. Most of the writers resided in the United States; two lived in other countries. All interviews were recorded and transcribed. We changed participants’ names and identifying characteristics in order to ensure confidentiality, a step that seemed comical on more than one occasion as we found ourselves making up pseudonyms for pseudonyms (the pennames authors already used).
As we analyzed our field notes, web content, and interviews for the larger project, we saw patterns forming around certain salient topics, or “sensitizing concepts” (Blumer 1969). For this article, we focus on how writers described the emotional difficulty of aspiring to become a published author. We carefully combed through our copious field notes and interview transcriptions, culling data that touched on the chronology of the pre-published stage and the emotions authors recalled having at this point in their careers. From there, we identified patterns that emerged around the themes of career callings, aspirations, and emotions, formed tentative theories to explain them, and probed deeper into those issues during subsequent interviews and observations. In some cases, the new data supported our analysis; in others they countered it, forcing us to reformulate our conceptual framework. This process made the data gathering and analysis an interactive, dialectical process in line with Glaser and Strauss’s (1967) model of grounded theory. We continued until we reached “theoretical saturation” (Glaser and Strauss 1967) and no new patterns emerged from the data.
Calling, Emotional Capital, and Becoming a “Real” Writer
The writers we studied discussed the emotional pull of their calling—the “consuming, meaningful passion” (Dobrow and Tosti-Kharas 2012, 265) they felt toward writing—and the difficult emotions that arose when they were repeatedly rejected in their quest to become published. This situation affected their ability to think of themselves as real writers. Our data show that aspirants’ identities tended to develop by turning their calling into emotional capital and drawing upon that capital to manage the doubt and demoralization of chasing their elusive dream careers. We call this process “aspirational emotion work” to illustrate how unpublished writers sustained their identities as real writers without the validation of being published in the competitive romance fiction market. 5
Constructing the Calling: Building Emotional Capital
When writers—both published and aspiring—explained the ways they began pursuing romance writing as a career, the most salient theme was the intense drive to write. This devotion infused their identities and, for most writers, preceded their desire to pursue publication. They cast writing as their calling—something they were “born to do”—which they constructed using two strategies: creating a discovery narrative about their past and explaining how their intense emotions in the present confirmed it. Emphasizing their long-lasting emotional ties to writing allowed aspiring writers to build their calling into emotional capital—to see their “system of emotional dispositions” (Cahill 1999, 122) as an essential part of who they were and as naturally aligned with being a real writer.
Discovery narratives. The stories people tell about themselves are integral to identity construction. These “internalized and evolving life stories” allow people to develop a coherent sense of self by narratively weaving together experiences that “otherwise might feel fragmented” and unrelated (McAdams, Josselson, and Lieblich 2006, 5). In this way, narratives impose meaning and shape identity. It is not surprising, then, that people’s stories about discovering their passions are an important component in understanding their callings (see Berkelaar and Buzzanell 2015; Bunderson and Thompson 2009; Fraher and Gabriel 2014; Thornborrow and Brown 2009). As we asked writers in our interviews to tell us how they came to their careers, and as we analyzed writers’ website biographies where they told their stories unsolicited, we saw that most writers constructed discovery narratives that emphasized writing as their calling, not only discursively, but also emotionally. Some described a single moment they knew they were meant to be writers, such as experiencing an existential crisis that compelled them to reevaluate what they wanted to do with their lives. For example, Colleen, a newly published author, described an incident that occurred years earlier during a philosophical question-and-answer game with friends: “One of the questions was ‘What are you afraid you won’t do before you die?’ And it just kind of came out of me, like, ‘I’m afraid I’m never going to write a book.’ It was on my bucket list, you know? . . . It just popped in my head. ‘I really want to do this. I should do this.’” Similarly, Kelly, who a decade prior had been “fooling around” with creative writing, decided to get serious when she was diagnosed with cancer. The crisis was “eye-opening” and made her realize that writing was her calling: “Oh my god, I could die at 33. Do I want not to have done what I really wanted to do with my life?”
Though Colleen and Kelly had not been seeking their callings when they had their epiphanies, other writers described intentionally searching because of some kind of existential angst, for example having a “midlife crisis,” as several authors stated. Jess explained: I was going to be turning 41 that year, and I’d been feeling really restless, kind of unhappy, and I thought [of the stories I had written as a teenager], and a little light bulb went off in my head. . . . [Writing] is what I wanted to do for a long time, but I’d been denying myself that. . . . I was still a little tentative. . . . So I took this class at [the local] Community College, and it was called, “What You Were Born to Do,” . . . and that class really solidified for me that writing was what I wanted to do, and that’s where my heart really lay.
From feeling unsettled in her job to actively searching for a career that she was “born to do,” Jess’s calling narrative was typical in that it rested on the idea that discovering a calling is a matter of following one’s “heart” to self-actualization and fulfillment (see Berg, Grant, and Johnson 2010; Dobrow and Tosti-Kharas 2012; Hall and Chandler 2005).
Though writers varied in the how they described their epiphanies—it could “pop” into their heads like for Colleen, or take the form of a “light bulb,” like for Jess—we heard dozens of stories about the “click” writers experienced when they had no history of writing fiction, but sat down to give it a try. In an interview with a magazine, a bestselling author explained how she got into romance writing as a career: I was really lucky. I know most people have to really search and try out different kinds of jobs, but the first minute that I decided I wanted to write a novel and started that first page, I really felt a click—that sense of everything falling into place. I knew it was what I was meant to do and what I wanted to do forever. . . . I just loved it so much that whether or not I started out with any talent, I was willing to really work at it.
The “click” that writers felt was a moment of deep emotional clarity, a “turning point when their feelings shifted” (Charmaz 1991, 221). Their narratives conveyed that they “knew” writing was their calling and that, as a career, it would provide them with self-actualization and personal fulfillment.
In contrast to the “click” writers, some writers expressed having always demonstrated a predisposition for creative writing. Our field-note observations, interviews, and writers’ own website bios included numerous examples of authors describing themselves as being “born with a book in my hand” and having written since “I was old enough to hold a crayon.” They cast their callings as inherited—“I’m a fourth-generation storyteller”—and this early drive to write, even if created retrospectively, was an extremely common way writers understood their identities. At a conference we attended, a bestselling author began her keynote address in the same way as many other writers we heard did, by describing the start of her writing career: “I have always had a total engagement with language. I completed my first story at the age of five. [Names the title and describes a hilariously juvenile plot.] I still have the book stowed away somewhere in the attic.” Many writers pointed out that they were still in possession of that first “manuscript,” which, from a narrative perspective, added an element of inevitability to their stories. They kept that first book because somehow they knew it predicted their calling; writing was their destiny.
Yet this lifelong devotion to writing took a great deal of time, and many writers in this group reported abandoning their writing at some point due to shifting priorities. For instance, it was common for writers to do so in college because careers in the arts were less secure. Karen, a corporate executive who would rather have been a full-time writer, told us she took a job at a booming dot-com firm because, “I was a creative writing major . . . but as graduation loomed, I knew I would likely need a ‘real job,’ as everyone likes to say.” And Samantha, a physician pursuing a sideline career writing paranormal romance, explained that although her lifelong love of storytelling was evident in her college English major, theater studies minor, and master’s thesis in literature, her parents dissuaded her from the arts: I almost didn’t go to med school because I got a theater contract [laughs]. . . . I called my parents up [and said], “Mom, Dad: I’m not going to med school; I’m going to become an actress” [laughs]. That conversation did not go over well. . . . They were like, “We’re not speaking to you if you do that.”
These other “more practical” professions were demanding and left writers little time to write, especially as they accumulated family obligations and household responsibilities. As one self-described “not-yet-published writer of romantic fantasy” explained in her third-person webpage bio, “She put her writing away while she focused on raising a young family and getting a ‘real’ job.” However, once she left her job and her children were more independent, “she had time on her hands for the first time in 15 years . . . and has been busy pursuing her writing ever since.” This theme of coming back to writing after an interruption was prevalent in the “always known” writers’ career narratives, which validated the authenticity of their calling: it had always been there and was destined to resurface because they were meant to be writers.
Emotional confirmations
Writers also constructed their calling by referring to the intense emotional satisfaction they experienced while writing, which confirmed that it was what they were meant to do. In fact, writers understood their calling as such an emotionally powerful force that they often talked about writing as if it were an independent entity, a perspective consistent with commonsense understandings of potent emotions (see Hochschild 1983). For example, one author said she knew writing was her destiny even before she was published because she “throbbed with joy” when she was writing and “that dream [of being published] just pounded in me.” A conference keynote speaker located her calling outside herself by advising writers “to step out of your own way” because “you don’t always get to pick” what you write; instead “what you write chooses you.” If writing was a calling, the drive was out of the writer’s control. As one conference presenter explained, “once you start, you can’t stop if you’re meant to be a writer. It’s a compulsion.”
Finding themselves in the grip of the writing compulsion was a great source of self-actualization for writers. They talked about the experience as “being in the zone,” a transcendental psychological state Csíkszentmihályi (1990) called “flow,” which is marked by complete absorption that people find immensely joyous and emotionally energizing. For example, writers said that the easiest books to write were “books from God” because the writer’s “muse” was cooperating and “you can smell the brain smoke” as words poured onto the page. A conference presenter described this creative state, which we recorded in our field notes: When [the presenter] is really on a roll, she goes in deeper, and she feels like she must siphon the creativity off of the moment or she might lose it. This happened recently: “the juices were flowing,” she was doing nine-hour writing stints, getting four hours of sleep, failing to shower, and hardly eating anything. Her husband, a software guy, said, “Isn’t that manic?” She disagreed and said she often saw him displaying the same behavior when he was in what he called “development mode.” So now she uses that term to describe her most deeply immersive writing process.
These experiences resemble what Charmaz (1991, 245) called the “intense present,” in which people feel “a sense of passion, authenticity, and involvement” and “the present feels fully lived.”
Writers understood this intensity as a sign that writing was an integral part of their identities, and they often used highly emotional language to express it. For example, a newly self-published author described herself on her blog, referring to “one of my first loves—Writing. Notice I capitalized the word? That shows how important it is to me, like heroin to a junkie, water to a parched woman, writing is something I must have every day whether anyone wants to read it or not.” Descriptions like these abounded in our data. Our participants spoke of writing as mandatory (“we write because we have to, or because of the voices in our heads, the stories that need to be told”) and of writing as being the cornerstone of emotional and self-fulfillment. One writer posted to a blog about her attempts to pursue a writing career. She explained that she quit her job as a graphic designer because she was so “infatuated” and “intoxicated” with romance-fiction writing that she “ached” to make it her career; a full-time focus on writing left her “3000% more fulfilled and excited” than her previous work. Such highly emotional descriptions can be found throughout studies of occupational callings (see Bunderson and Thompson 2009; Dobrow and Tosti-Kharas 2012; Fraher and Gabriel 2014), which implies that, together with creating discovery narratives about the past, recognizing intense emotions in the present are crucial strategies in constructing a calling.
Another way writers understood their calling as an emotional path to self-actualization was through the therapeutic benefits they received from writing. One writer referred to writing as her “life vest” when she was going through a divorce, and another who “lost everything” in Hurricane Katrina explained that writing “is better than Prozac. This is my drug of choice. Escaping into that. And then you don’t have to think about all the insanity that’s going on out there.” This therapeutic function was exemplified in a highly accomplished author’s conference keynote speech (posted on her website). She explained that after a personal tragedy caused her to give up her writing for several years, one day she pulled out her long-neglected typewriter: And the moment my fingers touched those keys the most amazing thing happened. Every character. Every voice I’d silenced on that cold winter night when my brother died came back with screaming clarity. I had no choice but to write. When my husband came home from work that night, he was horrified and I don’t blame him. He’d gone to work with a normal wife and come home to a stark raving lunatic. I was still sitting on the floor with tears streaming down my face and crumpled up pieces of paper all over. “Um, Honey, are you okay?” “Yes! I’m writing!”
The emotional intensity of writing deeply impacted writers’ identities and confirmed for them that this was what they were meant to be doing with their lives. One conference we attended featured a session titled “How Can You Tell You’re Writing the Book You Were Born to Write?” Panelists gave advice such as “You’d be writing even if no one ever read it” and “It’s the ‘Book of Your Heart,’” invoking a well-known phrase among romance writers to describe how the stories they were “born to write” were steeped in their emotions and identities.
Writers used these calling narratives and their emotionally confirming experiences as reasons to aspire to publication, but they also often needed outside validation that they had talent. One writer, who had published four books, recounted the story of her journey to publication in her website bio. She explained that when she found out she won a major award for her first unpublished manuscript, she knew it was her big break to making her calling a career: “I was on my way!” Another writer expressed a similar sentiment in an email on our romance writing list server. She explained how being named a finalist in a writing contest helped her feel more legitimate: “I’m so beyond stoked! . . . I just had to share my news. Holy cow. This is real. People who don’t know me actually like what I wrote. I AM a writer!” Our data were replete with these kinds of stories. Writers took this acknowledgement as a sign that writing was indeed their calling; they were real writers who should be pursuing careers as professional authors.
Pursuing a Career: Optimism, Demoralization, and Doubt
Fueled by the emotional capital of their calling, unpublished writers pursued careers as romance authors, the first step of which was getting a book published. Most dreamed of leaving their day jobs and earning a full-time income writing romance fiction, embracing what one author we spoke to called the “Hollywood version” of being a writer, a highly romanticized view that obscured the hard truth: the vast majority of writers never make full-time careers as authors. As aspirants confronted the realities of the competitive publishing industry, they could become demoralized by the slim chances of getting published and begin to doubt their talents. These feelings threatened their identities as real writers.
Not all writers began to pursue their dream career with significant naïveté about how difficult it was to make a living as a writer; however, many did. Trina, an author of fourteen books who also taught classes on writing commercial fiction, spoke to us about the beginners’ ignorance she frequently saw in her students: They’re like, “Do I really need a full[y written] book to sell?” [I say], “Yeah, honey, you really do, because how do you know you can write it?” [They say] “I’ve got great ideas coming out of my ears!” [I say] “It’s not the idea—it’s sitting down and getting it done.” . . . Or they’re like, “I’m planning on . . . publishing with [Random House] and . . . having this readership,” and [I think], “That’s so cute; you know enough to be dangerous, but you cannot plot your way out of a paper bag.” . . . They [say], “I hate my day job. I want to quit and write all day long because that will be glorious.” [I say] “Do you know advances are like four thousand dollars per book? And if you can’t stick it out through the bad experience with a day job, relying all your income on [writing] will not help you.” And that’s the hardest thing to get across, because they don’t want to hear it.
Trina tried to impress upon her students the difficulty of getting published (especially with a major publisher) and sustaining a career as a writer. Her students did not “want to hear it” because these reality checks were discouraging.
Many newly aspiring writers seemed to believe that, because it felt so intense, their calling would translate to commercial success, a philosophy in line with the protean career orientation, wherein people choose careers by following a “path with a heart” (Hall and Chandler 2005, 162) and popularized by cultural maxims such as “do what you love and the money will follow” (see Duffy 2016). We heard many examples of writers’ early optimism, such as when unpublished writers referred to themselves as “pre-published.” Trina believed this phrase reflected new writers’ naïveté about the career opportunities as professional authors: “In the real business world, you do not do this. You do not say, ‘I’m pre-employed.’” Yet these pervasive examples of new aspirants’ optimism were significant elements of the romance-writer subculture because they emanated from writers’ callings.
New writers’ optimism, however, was quickly threatened. For example, they were often surprised to hear they needed a literary agent to represent them if they wanted to “sell” to (obtain a contract from) a major “house.” The “Big Five” or the “New York” presses almost never accepted un-agented submissions. On the rare occasion that they did, the manuscript went into the “slush pile,” where its chances of being selected for publication, according to an author running a workshop we attended, were akin to “being a high school football player drafted into the NFL.” Even after learning about agents, many aspiring writers remained optimistic about their chances of finding one. Francesca, a highly successful agent, explained to us that she was always “blunt” about how few clients she took on and how hard it was to “make it” as an author because there were “so many people who want to do this, but can’t and won’t.” She told aspiring writers that she kept only thirty-five clients at a time because she wanted to make sure they could make a full-time living. She elaborated that after agent fees, taxes, and the time spanning a typical contract, this meant securing a six-figure deal, which she only achieved for approximately five new authors per year. Upon hearing these numbers, new writers began to understand how difficult it was to become published, much less make writing a viable career.
The conflicting emotions of optimism and demoralization were often present simultaneously. On one occasion, we sat in the audience at a writers’ conference featuring a panel of agents and captured writers’ reactions in our field notes: “One agent estimated that she received over 600 unsolicited queries every month, usually accepting only one or two as clients. We could hear a few gasps from the tables around us as people realized the degree of competition and the slim chances of getting an agent.” However, the agent quickly followed that potentially discouraging remark with the optimistic reminder: “But it does happen. I just signed something from the slush pile today. So it can happen. Keep trying.” Another agent at the same panel offered similarly contradictory messages, explaining that she received about twenty unsolicited manuscripts per day, and over the previous year, had taken on just three. “But,” she added, “one of those was a seven-figure deal.” In both cases, the demoralization that aspiring authors in the audience may have been prompted to feel was buffered by the agents’ simultaneous encouragement to remain optimistic.
Given the optimism in the romance-writing community, it was not surprising that many aspiring writers persevered in querying agents despite learning about dismal industry conditions. Kayla had been pursuing a career as a romance writer for over two years when she shared her initial experiences: When I wrote my first [vampire] book . . . I queried five agents. I thought for sure that they were going to buy it [all laugh]. This was before [I found] RWA or anything because [before you are socialized to the industry] you write something and you think, “This is good,” because you don’t know. And then everybody rejected it. Then I started thinking, “Okay, it isn’t original enough. . . . People aren’t buying vampires [anymore].” . . . So then I tried to be super-original [by writing about faeries], and then I queried that. I thought for sure that people were going to buy it. And everybody rejected it. . . . [After a dozen rejections] I still thought it was fabulous [laughs], but then after I got 40 rejections I thought, “No it’s not.”
Kayla’s story was fairly typical. Not only was blanket rejection extremely discouraging, but it also made writers wonder whether they had enough talent. Such self-doubt could be paralyzing. Writers talked about how rejections and harsh critiques “blocked” and “stalled” their writing. They identified so strongly with their stories that rejection felt painfully personal; it was, according to an adage in the romance-writing community, akin to telling a writer “your baby is ugly.” The emotional capital authors had accumulated through their calling narratives and the culture of optimism, while generally effective in reducing their initial discouragement over unfavorable market conditions, was far less effective in negating the self-doubt that arose from repeated rejection.
Jess explained that when agents and editors rejected her Mafia-themed romance, she became “concerned” about whether she belonged in the romance genre at all: I had pitched [the book] and had gotten varied responses like, “I love it. Can you move it to Chicago?” because they didn’t want a book set in Italy—apparently there is no romance in Italy. . . . And then the other [typical comment] was “I don’t like Mafia stories.” You know, basically, “Your baby’s so ugly I don’t even want to see it.” [It made me wonder]: did I fit into traditional [romance] publishing?
Even if it was not strong enough to make them quit, doubting their artistic inclinations could lead writers to “chase New York,” a strategy whereby they changed what they wrote to match market trends. Experienced writers believed this strategy was doomed to fail because it was inauthentic. Samantha, the physician/paranormal writer who almost became an actor, had been pursuing publication with a Big Five press for three years when we talked to her in 2011. She told us about her ill-advised foray into the young adult subgenre, a project she dubbed “Operation Sellout” for its intended goal of getting her published even though it was not a genre she enjoyed. The book did not sell, which taught Samantha a lesson that is integral to artistic-labor-market logic: disregarding one’s muse to adapt to a competitive market was a strategy destined to fail (see Umney and Kretsos 2015).
Industry demoralization and self-doubt were exacerbated for aspiring LGBTQ writers and writers of color. They described to us what they saw as the romance publishing industry’s institutional heterosexism and racism, which further restricted their chances of becoming published. Participants told us this discrimination occurred on three levels: first, the mainstream outlets for “diverse” romances were extremely limited, so LGBTQ stories were relegated to niche queer or “erotic” presses (regardless of the level of sexual explicitness in the story) with very limited distribution. Within the Big Five publishing houses, Black, Latina, and Asian stories were diverted to niche “multicultural romance” lines, where prestige, marketing resources, and sales were lower. Second, the industry segregation trickled down to the retail level, where “diverse” romances were often not shelved in the “romance” section, but rather in identity-category shelving (e.g., “African American” or “Gay Literature”), where romance readers would not find them. Third, aspiring writers of color then faced interpersonal racism: editors and agents tended to funnel the books they did accept to their press’s specialty “diversity” line based on their perceived race of the author, rather than on the race or cultural backgrounds of the characters (LGBTQ-identified authors could escape this filter if they wrote heterosexual romance, effectively passing as straight). Karen, the dot-com executive, was a Black aspiring author who had been pursuing publication for four years. She explained her experiences trying to sell a manuscript, in which she kept her characters’ races ambiguous: I’ll pitch my book to [an agent] at a conference and they’ll say, “Okay, send over the manuscript,” and they’ll write back to me [after reading it and say], “Were your characters Black?” And I think it’s funny because they’re only asking that because they’ve seen me [at the in-person pitch]. . . . These agents [said] that they would not know where to market my novel because I’m Black and there is a Black [main] character, but it wouldn’t really fit properly in the African American line. And so I have struggled a great deal with this. . . . It’s the age-old question, like from the movie Hollywood Shuffle: Do you make your book “Blacker” to get it sold? . . . So I definitely feel like . . . as Black and Asian and Latina writers, we need the work-around; we need the extra extension cord to get our writing to the same place that [white writers] can get to without thinking about [race].
These discouraging experiences disproportionately affected LGBTQ writers and writers of color; their straight, white counterparts did not have to confront the “age-old question” of whether they should alter their artistic vision to meet heterosexist and racist market distinctions in the already highly competitive publishing industry. As such, these marginalized writers experienced more doubt, and thus more potent threats to their identities as real writers.
Though the degree of their experiences varied, almost all of the writers we talked to discussed struggling with industry demoralization and self-doubt during their quest to become published. A published author told us that in the unpublished phase, “you are still looking for that validation of somebody saying you are good enough to be published. It’s hard not to have that.” In a joint interview with Beth, who had been pursuing publication for eight years, and Kelly, the cancer survivor and author of three contemporary romances, we asked what the most difficult part of writing was:
How do I prove to the outside world before I’m published that I’m a real writer?
That’s a hard thing to do.
That’s my hardest thing right now.
Stories like Beth’s were a reminder of the circular forces at play in aspiring authors’ emotional lives. On the one hand, their calling provided them with the certainty and optimism to pursue publication; on the other hand, failure to become published cast severe doubt on their identities as real writers.
Aspirational Emotion Work: Using the Calling
The excessive rejection, self-doubt, and demoralization writers experienced could lead them to question their identities as real writers and abandon their aspirations. As we examined the ways writers maintained their aspirations in these trying circumstances, we saw that the process involved a type of emotion work that relied heavily on their calling. In this way, the certainty of the calling served as a potent form of emotional capital for writers; they invoked it to manage the problematic emotions that threatened their identities as real writers—feelings that might otherwise deter them from continuing to seek publication. This particular type of emotion work—using a calling as emotional capital to persevere in competitive industries—is a process we have termed “aspirational emotion work.” Romance writers performed it through several strategies.
One way writers suppressed doubt about their talents was by consciously prioritizing their internal sense of calling over the external evidence of failure, at times a tall order given the rampant rejection many aspirants experienced. The romance-writing community explicitly coached aspirants to do this. At one RWA conference, a bestselling author spent her keynote address explaining how “self-doubt kills creativity.” She then “set the tone” for rest of the event by declaring it a “No-Doubt Conference!” She went on to remind all of the writers in the room, many of whom were still seeking publication, to let their calling guide them at the conference: “You were brought here by a force inside you; your job is to indulge that.” This strategy of deepening their faith in the calling often worked. Though Kayla had since sold the faery manuscript (and three more), we asked why she did not give up after 40 rejections. She told us, “I always kind of thought that this was what I was meant to do. . . . I just knew that I needed help.” Armed with the knowledge that writing was her calling, Kayla was able to manage her doubt and continue aspiring toward publication.
Redefining rejection was a second strategy writers used to perform aspirational emotion work. At a conference workshop we attended, the presenter advised the audience members to develop a “thick skin” when it came to criticism and to “check your emotions at the door. If it’s your diary, it’s personal; if it’s a novel, it’s business! It’s professional.” Writers assuaged their hurt feelings by depersonalizing rejection and defining it as an inherent part of being a professional writer. The message was that real writers used rejection as a tool to improve; writers should use criticism as an opportunity to “get better, not bitter!” as one interviewee told us. A romance writer we followed on Facebook shared a link to a science-fiction writer’s blog, wherein he elaborated on the importance of redefining rejection as positive: Rejection has value. It teaches us when our work or our skillset is not good enough and must be made better. This is a powerful revelation. . . . Rejection refines us. Those who fall prey to its enervating soul-sucking tentacles are doomed. Those who persist are survivors. Best ask yourself the question: what kind of writer are you? The kind who survives? Or the kind who gets asphyxiated by the tentacles of woe?
Asking writers to identify as survivors or victims was a way to encourage them to revisit and access the emotional capital of their calling. Overcoming the “soul-sucking” emotions that threatened to derail their aspirations depended on identifying as real writers—the kind who survive and persist despite rejection. This finding dovetails with research on occupational callings. For example, Dobrow and Tosti-Kharas (2012, 276) found that stronger callings made aspiring musicians and business students more resistant to the “repeated disappointment, rejection, and depression” that come with pursuing a career in these highly competitive markets (see also Hall and Chandler 2005).
Indeed, writers saw this undeterred persistence as a sign of the calling’s authenticity (see Dobrow and Tosti-Kharas 2012; Umney and Kretsos 2015). For example, the number of rejection letters a writer accumulated could be touted as a badge of honor by those who had finally succeeded in getting published because, according to a mantra in the writing community, “real failure is giving up.” One published author told us she sometimes brought her rejection letters, which numbered in the thousands, to conferences to “show people . . . that if I can do it, you can do it.” By definition, real writers found the emotional fortitude to persevere in the face of overwhelming rejection; they could sustain their aspirations when they understood that it was this very struggle to survive that constituted the real writer identity.
A third way writers performed aspirational emotion work was by endorsing a time-limited experience of demoralization and doubt. Validating disappointment seemed important and unavoidable, often precisely because writers’ sense of calling was so strong. Beth and Kelly’s writing group understood the necessity of professionalizing criticism, but also wanted to support each other through dream-crushing rejections, so they enacted a “24-hour rule” during which they could “be whiny” because “everybody is allowed to have a pity party once in a while.” After that, however, they had to suppress their self-pity and get back to writing. When we asked Kelly how she could get over her rejection in twenty-four hours, she invoked a writing-community motto: “Writers write.” She went on to explain, “A writer doesn’t have to be published. If you’re writing, you are ‘A Writer.’” This phrase allowed writers to draw on their calling to provide the emotional capital they needed to manage their devastation; writers’ identities did not hinge on the external achievement of publishing a book, but on the internal orientation of the calling to write. Having reaffirmed the calling in this way, writers had no choice but to persevere.
Though writers effectively utilized the emotional capital of their calling to maintain their aspirations, persistence alone did not guarantee publication. Several other factors in the competitive publishing industry had to align, many of which were out of writers’ control. Therefore, the final aspirational strategy writers employed was acknowledging fate—a concept that involves the seemingly paradoxical forces of luck and destiny. One bestselling author told her conference workshop audience that publishing was a matter of “getting the right manuscript to the right editor at the right time. . . . You’re fighting the odds, so luck is a big part of it. But so is hard work. The harder you work, the luckier you get.” This type of “account” (Scott and Lyman 1968) helped writers manage their doubt and demoralization by emphasizing that some rejections were due to poor timing rather than inadequate skill. A rejection did not mean “no” as much as it meant “not yet.” As Beth, the eight-year aspirant, explained, “In this business, you have to have a certain level of faith that things are going to get where you want them. . . . [If] people are rejecting me, I’m not meant to be working with [them] anyways. . . . I’m convinced that’s why I haven’t sold yet.” Beth relied on her calling to reason that she was “not meant to be” working with the agents and editors who did not connect with her writing voice and see the value of her manuscripts. Faith in the calling was the emotional capital that enabled writers’ aspirational emotion work. They persevered in this highly rejection-prone industry because they were meant to be writers.
Conclusion
By focusing on writers’ prolonged states of career aspiration, this article illuminates some of the emotional and identity effects unpublished romance writers faced when confronted with the realities of the competitive publishing industry. Aspiring writers relied on their sense of calling as the emotional capital they needed to pursue careers as professional authors, developing narratives about their past selves and relying on their intense emotions in the present to confirm that they were “meant to be” writers. Not only did the emotional capital of the calling provide writers with the optimism to pursue publication, it also served as a useful tool in managing the demoralization and doubt they felt after repeated rejection. Writers revisited the calling, reminded themselves that they were meant to be writers, and used that emotional capital to push through their discouragement. Because managing their emotions in this way allowed writers to persevere in the competitive publishing industry and sustain the identity they were striving to confirm, we have termed this process aspirational emotion work.
One contribution of this research is that it uncovers theoretical linkages between occupational callings and emotions, not only by revealing that callings are a form of emotional capital but also by showing that callings contain two essential components: a discovery narrative and emotional confirmation. Some research has focused on the importance of the calling narratives people construct when explaining where the passion for their work comes from. For example, Bunderson and Thompson assert that “constructing a narrative of occupational place” allowed the zookeepers they studied to “establish a pattern of behavior that confirm[ed] a stable and coherent sense of self” related to the calling (2009, 37). Fraher and Gabriel’s study of furloughed pilots elaborated on this idea, claiming that calling narratives create “occupational identity anchors” that “motivate members [of an occupation], sustain them through periods of hardship, and inspire them to deal with adversities” (2014, 927). Our research confirms the role of the self-history discovery narrative as an important way people legitimize their callings. However, by conceptualizing callings as a form of emotional capital, our research extends this idea by revealing that writers experienced what we call “emotional confirmations,” whereby they experienced their calling in the “intense present” by “tying vivid feelings and passionate convictions to the self” (Charmaz 1991, 246). Further, we show that this authentication was integral to constructing their sense of calling. When writers used these emotional forms of occupational identity anchors in two temporal periods—the past and the present—they strengthened their identity claims because doing so allowed them to “unif[y] subjective experience over time,” a process that comprises the very essence of self-concept (Charmaz 1991, 230). Thus, we see that when viewed through the lens of emotional capital, callings may contain both a discovery narrative about the past and emotional confirmation in the present. Furthermore, this type of emotional capital—constructing a calling by establishing identity anchors over time—helped writers create a trajectory they could extrapolate into the future. If their discovery narratives confirmed the calling in the past, and their intense emotions while writing confirmed it in the present, their identity trajectories seemed to be headed straight toward realizing their writing-career dreams; the calling seemed like their destiny.
This finding leads to a second contribution of our research: that the emotional capital of a calling can be an important resource for developing aspirants’ resilience in competitive labor markets. Our data suggest that drawing upon a calling allowed writers to bridge the gap between actual self (in the present) and aspired-to self (in the future). Thornborrow and Brown demonstrated that for the British paratroopers they studied, bringing the actual self into line with the desired self was an “almost impossible ideal” (2009, 363) because the elite Parachute Regiment constructed a highly precarious paratrooper identity. Paratroopers had to continually prove themselves worthy of elite status, which caused them ubiquitous “status anxieties” (363) and left them in a constant state of aspiration. To counter this, the paratroopers constructed self-narratives, or “aspirational identities,” that discursively cast them first as “earnestly desirous of being a particular kind of person,” and second, as “self-consciously and consistently pursuing this objective” (370); in other words, they actively tried to narrow the gap between their present and desired selves. Our data dovetail with Thornborrow and Brown’s model of aspirational identity by confirming the importance of the narrative in aspiring to a desired occupational identity (see also Fraher and Gabriel 2014). Thornborrow and Brown do not make emotions a central feature of their analysis, however, despite claiming that aspirational identities “marshal individuals’ dreams and desires” and reflect “the yearning to find meaning” (2009, 371). Thus their work, while illuminating salient features of the aspirational identity, does not fully examine the emotions underlying these identity negotiations, nor the emotion work involved in negotiating the gap between the actual and aspired-to selves. If managing emotions is really managing self-in-emotion (Hochschild 1983), it stands to reason that managing an aspirational identity would also involve managing the “emotive dissonance” (Hochschild 1983, 90) that occurs between actual and aspired-to selves. In short, Thornborrow and Brown’s model of aspirational identity does not explain how aspirants tamp down the “status anxieties” that plague their constant state of aspiration.
Our data answer this question by suggesting that it is “aspirational emotion work”—a type of emotion work that relies on using a calling as emotional capital to persevere in competitive industries—that sustains aspirants as they endeavor to bridge the gap between actual and desired selves. The writers we studied did just this: they primarily relied on their calling to eradicate self-doubt in their talents and overcome demoralization when they could not get published. In this way, our data confirm Schweingruber and Berns’s (2005) finding that emotional capital may aid workers in performing the emotion work they need to persevere in rejection-prone industries, such as in the door-to-door book-sales market they studied. Schweingruber and Berns found that, under the direction of their corporate employer, recruits “mined” their pasts for emotional capital that would give them an “emotional purpose” for selling books door to door, and then learned strategies to react to setbacks on the job by “staying motivated,” “staying positive,” and “controlling emotions” (2005, 689). Schweingruber and Berns note that the bookselling company’s emotional training goal was to help recruits build new selves that could handle the emotional challenges of repeated rejection. These techniques helped booksellers build “emotional bridges” between the “old self” and the “new self” (2005, 691).
In showing how aspiring romance writers used emotional narratives and positive emotions to bridge the gap between present (unpublished) self and future (published) self, this article builds on the basic processes Schweingruber and Berns document by focusing on the importance of the self-imposed calling narrative in aspiring toward something writers dreamt about for years—in some cases, since they were “old enough to hold a crayon.” In contrast to Schweingruber and Berns’s booksellers, who had their “emotional purpose” bestowed upon them by their employer, writers’ callings sprang from a deep sense of who they were. Thus, when they failed to bridge the gap between actual and desired selves, the identity stakes were higher.
Although our findings are specific to aspiring romance writers, they have “theoretical generalizability” (Glaser and Strauss 1967) for other industries in which preexisting callings are prevalent and aspirants are unwilling to give up their dreams, such as in creative labor markets more generally (see Berg, Grant, and Johnson 2010; Dobrow and Tosti-Kharas 2012; Umney and Kretsos 2015). Our findings suggest that the emotional capital of a calling may serve as a significant resource in prolonging aspirants’ perseverance in fields where the potential for artistic expression and self-actualization is high but the opportunity for employment is low. As such, we propose bringing these previously compartmentalized dynamics together to view creative workers’ experiences in managing their callings, emotions, and career goals as a theoretically integrated process. Aspirational emotion work enhances our understanding of the creative industries by showing not only how creative workers may construct a calling in their area of passion, but importantly, how it may be used as emotional capital in sustaining their identities as real artists when career success is elusive.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the Romance Writers of America for awarding us the 2011 and 2016 Academic Research Grants, which covered many of the costs associated with this project. Thanks also go to the Bureau of Faculty Research at Western Washington University and the Office of the Provost and Division of Social Sciences at Pacific Lutheran University for providing us with additional financial support to conduct this research. We are also indebted to Rayanne Streeter for her invaluable research assistance on this project and Rebecca Rathbun for her transcription expertise. Finally, we thank Editor Edgley and several anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on previous versions of this article.
Authors’ Note
An earlier version of this article was presented at the 2016 annual meetings of the Popular Culture Association. Portions were presented at the 2013 annual conference of the Romance Writers of America and the 2014 Washington Romance Writers Retreat.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and /or publication of this article: The authors acknowledged receiving financial support for this research through the Romance Writers of America’s Academic Research Grant, the Bureau of Faculty Research at Western Washington University, and the Office of the Provost and Division of Social Sciences at Pacific Lutheran University.