The Most Discouraging Aspect of Writing for Money

Important facts about becoming a freelance writer

Link to the original article

I once heard the famous public intellectual Christopher Hitchens say that writers must write. A writer is something that someone is, rather than something that someone does. And in order to write and to write well, one needn't rely upon schooling. Rather, one must simply write.

All of this, of course, is true. And yet, there is clearly something missing from it. Namely, the factors which err away so many from the field of writing. So many wish to be writers, but entering into it as a profession is extraordinarily daunting, and quite frankly, for good reasons. These factors boil down to two fundamental categories:

Writers are unpaid for a long time before getting paid work

I began writing as a career in June 2018. I was a junior in my undergraduate degree, going on to become a senior. From June 2018 to May 2019, I had about 3 nearly full-time writing gigs, all of which did not pay me. Just like many millennials, I was fortunate enough to be supported by my family at the time, so I was capable of sticking it through such unpaid work while finishing off my degree.

However, even with being supported, the lack of payment was profoundly deterring. I felt as if my work was not being appreciated as much as it ought to have been; I felt like the quality of my work was profoundly astute, yet, I was not at all being rewarded for it — or at least it felt like I wasn't.

Finally, after straggling along uncompensated, I received an internship as a journalist where I was getting paid $150 per article! Knowing what compensation for work is like for ordinary 21-year-olds, I was delightfully surprised at this.

But, the only reason I was capable of getting this position was that I worked for a whole year unpaid. When I went in for the interview, the interviewer immediately said, “we were really impressed with your portfolio.” If I did not have a portfolio — which, I wouldn’t have if I decided to give in to how deterring unpaid writing is — this internship would have surely gone to someone else.

When I declared my undergraduate major in philosophy, my major-advisor asked me, “what do you want to do with a degree in philosophy?” I immediately responded, “I want to be a writer.” I was fortunate enough for him to tell me that the first thing I need to do is publish as much as possible, and to realize that for a long time, I will not be paid for what I write.

Writing gigs tend to not be interesting

To quote Friedrich Nietzsche,

“The best author will be the one who is ashamed to become a writer.”

When one says that they are a writer, they mean that it is something for which they need to do. It is their best mode of communicating who they are and what they believe. In the domain of writing as a profession, there is very little space for this level of expression. At bottom, what most of us writers dream of is to have a regular op-ed column in a big magazine or newspaper. Most writing gigs, by contrast, are nowhere near this freeing. If you have a field of interest as a writer, it is extremely challenging to get a good-paying job or even ordinary gigs writing about that interest. For the bulk of writers, one really needs to just take what they can get.

For instance, when I first began writing as a career, I wrote about global poverty and financial technology for my first year. These were nowhere near my fields of interest. Luckily, I am open-minded enough to enjoy learning new things, but this isn’t the case for everyone. Some individuals would have been so bored by writing about these topics that they might have called it a quits. It can be demoralizing to write about things you have absolutely no interest in. You might love writing about astrophysics, but your first writing gig will almost certainly not be writing about astrophysics — rather, you’ll probably end up copywriting for a website you’ve never heard of, for a product or service you do not care about. This is another hurdle modern writers need to get over in order to get to the ideal state where they are getting paid to write what they enjoy writing about. And even if you manage to survive these hurdles and work extremely hard, there is absolutely no guarantee that you’ll ever get paid writing about what you enjoy writing about.

Again, I’ve been fortunate enough to land gigs where it has either been in one of my fields of interest (e.g. health sciences and psychology) or to have landed gigs where the field was not of my interest, but in having looked at it more closely, it became interesting to me (e.g. global poverty). The word “fortunate” cannot be overstated here; even with all of the hard work I put in, it could have easily been the case that I never acquired a gig that sparked my intellectual interest. And if I hadn’t, it is very possible that after too long of being bored writing about things I had no interest in, I would have grown impatient and given up on writing as a career altogether, as so many others do. It is very understandable why so many do not have the patience to stick it out in order to be a writer — indeed, the fact that I began getting paid work after only a year of unpaid work is even rare; so many writers spend several years hustling away getting nothing out of their personal blog before they get paid, only to write what bores them into a coma.

To be a writer and to make money off of writing, you need a combination of hustle, passion, and patience. You will not get paid for a long time and it is very likely that when you start to get paid, you might not enjoy the topic you are writing about. Those who ride out these pains, however, are very capable of making a good career out of expressing their thoughts on their topics of passion through the art of writing.