Operating Writing

When you’re preparing your taxes, you have to get your laughs where you can. I use an online filing tool that has saved my sanity, but it is—like all such programs—one size fits all. When it comes to the income other than my salary, I have picked the category “999999,” which is everything that is not categorizable as food service, freight hauling, and so on, and have described the service for which I am being paid as “writing.” It is, after all, what I do when I’m not teaching, unless you want to list “reading,” which of course figures into the activity in a big way (both reading aloud, as in “giving a reading,” and reading silently, of which the writing is a sort of consequence) but which would probably get me audited.

Being user-friendly, my tax-prep program asks me a series of questions for which my listed activity, like an entry in Mad Libs, provides the missing word:

• Do you have expenses for a car or light truck that are related to Writing?
• Enter your expenses for advertising and contract labor for Writing.
• Enter the amounts paid to employees for commissions, pension and profit-sharing plans, wages, and other employee benefits for Writing.
• Enter the amount paid for rent on vehicles and other property for Writing.
• Enter any legal and professional fees that are ordinary and necessary expenses directly related to operating Writing.
• Do you have amortization costs for Writing?
• Enter any allowable deduction for depletion related to Writing. Depletion occurs when natural resources are used up during mining quarrying, drilling, or felling. The depletion deduction is for the reduction of a product’s reserves.

I did pause a bit on that last one before hitting Continue. Because surely it is true that each time I print a manuscript—and I print a lot, though I try to choose double-sided and to buy recycled stock—I have helped cause felling, and my dependence on the computer has reduced the reserves of natural resources for electricity, silicon chips, and the like. Not to mention how depleted I sometimes get, and I consider my imagination a natural resource, at least as limited as, say, rock. But I know neither of these is what my program is asking about.

Nor do the authors of my tax-prep program find anything quirky about the idea of “operating Writing.” But I love it. I sit here at the keyboard as at the wheel of a tractor-trailer, operating my writing like an old hand; I summon my words and send them to do their work on the page like a veritable job creator, operating my linguistic corporation with tenacity and resolve. I am the 1%, they the 99%, and I refuse to let them vote me down.

I suppose I could count my car as “related to Writing,” if I argued for the number of hours I’ve spent driving late at night, when I’ve got an idea cooking but it just won’t gel, and a slow journey over Avon Mountain, up Nod Hill Road, and back along Simsbury Road will do the trick. But I worry that a Yes to that question will invite other questions that I understand approximately as well as I understand depletion, so I let it alone.

My point here is not to mock the software’s wording—as I’ve said, the program is a godsend, and I’m the one who chose “writing,” after all.  Rather, it strikes me what an odd activity this is. I pay a hairdresser to cut my hair, a plow operator to operate his plow on my driveway. No one’s really paying me to write, though occasionally they pay me for a tiny slice of that writing (think, if you will, of a thousand plowed driveways left behind, in order to be paid for this one driveway to which all those other driveways led). They pay me, sometimes, to talk about the writing with writing apprentices. As to the costs—well, I can list some, though none under amortization: travel, supplies, subscriptions, and the like. But oh, the true costs of writing! They are like the true earnings. Neither has a place in the forms.