MOST years, Marie Myung-Ok Lee, the author of six novels, including The Evening Hero (Simon & Schuster, 2022), earns a fair bit of money writing for publications like the Atlantic and Salon and making appearances at various colleges and universities. But in 2020, the first year of the pandemic, the cancellation of in-person events across the United States caused a steep dip in her freelance income.
As a freelance writer, Lee knew this was obviously a problem. As a taxpayer, however, she realized it presented her something of an opportunity, because it meant that when it came time to tot up her gains and losses for the IRS, using a form called Schedule C, she was able to claim deductions on her tax bill.
“Irrespective of how much income I’m coming in with, I still do the Schedule C and take all the deductions,” she says. “Once you’ve established over a number of consecutive years that your writing is a business and not a hobby, it’s allowable to occasionally operate at a loss, just like any other business.”
Lee, who is the writer-in-residence at Columbia University’s Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, says she learned the tricks of managing the taxes for her creative life from a master, an IRS enrolled tax agent named Curtis
