For a writer, being a professional is considered the highest distinction. If someone is paid, and especially if he is published traditionally, well, he must be really good.
And if paid writers are the best, then it is easy to assume that those who write only for the love of it are the worst. This assumption is built into the word “amateur,” which means “dabbler.” Yet the word amateur originates from the Latin word “amare,” meaning “to love.”
Does that mean that doing something “only” for the love of it is likely to be frivolous, inept, or casual?
Many, if not most, professional writers began writing because they loved doing it. Science fiction writer Isaac Asimov began his career as a hobbyist. He began writing stories on his own, and although he eventually made a career of writing, his love for it endured throughout his life, making him one of the most prolific writers in the world.
Ray Bradbury loved writing so much that, near the end of his career, he proclaimed that he had never worked in his life.
When I was in college, I was speechless with admiration for these writers. So many professional writers were cynical about writing, calling it “torture” or a form of insanity.
It seemed that a rite of passage for all writers was to suffer horribly until they reached a jaded dislike for the profession they had chosen. But here were two authors who managed to get paid for their writing while retaining the passion of a hobbyist.
Unlikely many writers, they avoided drug abuse and alcoholism. For them writing was euphoric. They were “amateurs” in the original sense of the word: as those who love what they do. But they were also excellent writers.
I wanted to be a writer like that. I wanted to have a career in writing and be paid, yet not hate writing. How did they do it?
Some professionals advise beginners to forget about having fun. Writing, they say, is grueling labor analogous to coal mining. They insist that the promise of a paycheck, not love of writing, produces excellence.
My experience has led me to a different perspective. Until a couple of years ago, I had never been paid much for my writing, aside from a published article on girls in video games.
Most all of the writing I had done was for myself, because I loved doing it. I wanted to be paid, but I was willing to write for the intrinsic reward of creating. I could not see myself ever being happy without writing.
By the time I started to freelance, I had recently recovered from a three year period of depression and block, in which I was fully convinced I could never enjoy writing again. When I rediscovered how to enjoy writing, my ability to write freely became my touchstone for happiness. I distilled my new understanding into a simple formulation: Writing equals happiness. Not writing equals unhappiness.
Based on these tenets, I could have written for myself forever. But due to a rocky financial situation a couple of years ago, I ventured into the world of on-line freelancing, using websites where jobs were posted and anyone could bid on them. One of the most popular websites for this is Elance.
Clients who turn to Elance usually have big dreams and low budgets. It is a virtual flea market where the rule is that performance will match pay. If a client pays 20 dollars for 50 pages of text, they can expect drivel or plagiarism.
Most jobs pay higher but Elance is no path to wealth. Still, writers with impressive-sounding credentials compete hard for Elance jobs, so even bad jobs are hard to get. Thus, it is always tempting to bid low in order to get a response at all. And it is hard to know what to bid, because until you land a job and get into it, you cannot know what all is involved.
I landed a job from an estate attorney. I bid around 130.00 to write some text on his website. My bid turned out to be way too low, even though I only had to write part of the web text. The client had selected two other contractors to handle different aspects of estate law.
Still, I was responsible for about 15 pages of densely technical text that I was supposed to make “accessible” to everyone. The lawyer sent me reams of source material about trusts. It took time to learn the material. That was not so bad. I welcomed the opportunity to learn something new. I began the writing, and when the lawyer asked to see my progress, he was impressed with my work.
But I was spending too many hours on it. Per hour my wages would have been better suited to a sweat shop.
Was I allowing myself to be exploited? The “sane” thing to do seemed to be to rush through the project and match my work to meet the low pay. But I was not used to thinking that way, and did not want to start.
The idea of allowing myself to write drivel depressed me. I was convinced that it would hurt me more than being underpaid.
I was used to blogging for free, and I had never minded. I was so happy that I could write at all that I even welcomed the painstaking revision at the end. I would spend however long I needed to get my point across in exactly the way that I imagined it.
But now that I was getting paid, the rules of the game had changed, and the new rules upset me. Putting them out of my mind, I slipped into my blogging mode. I became obsessed with seeing if I could write in the authoritative voice of an attorney while making the abstract content as interesting as possible.
When my husband saw how much time I was devoting to the project, he shook his head. “This lawyer is getting $1000.00 worth of work for $130.00,” he said. “He is paying you practically nothing, and getting Hemingway to write his text for him.”
Though flattered about the Hemingway part, I could not help but feel depressed when he said that, but I was almost done. Besides, if I wrote badly, I would not enjoy the writing. As long as I did my best, I would not be bored and I would be increasing my skills. Writing garbage would have been the real work.
I modified my original tenet of “Writing equals happiness” to “Writing well equals happiness.”
Aside from accepting a task created by someone else, I reached a point where I was no longer writing for my client but for myself. When communicating with him online, I was aware of his expectations and was friendly. But when I sat down with the text, I saw only words. And I loved words.
When I finally turned it the finished product, the lawyer applauded my work and thought I had gone out of my way just to please him. “The voice sounds just like me,” he said. I was paid and thought I would never hear from him again.
But months later the lawyer invited me to bid on a new job. He said that, on the previous job, my contribution was the best. The goal was to rewrite, in my own style, all of the web text written for the last job by the other two contractors.
I still needed money so I accepted his invitation but bid higher. The lawyer accepted my proposal and sent me the text written by the other contractors.
When I looked at the text, I was stunned. The text was written in the dull, self-conscious style of a fifth grade book report. The text was full of inaccuracies, and some of it was lifted directly from the source material. The writers clearly had no interest in the content and saw no relevance in it that they could communicate to the readers.
I went on the Elance website to see who these awful writers were. They both had five star ratings and their credentials were glowingly impressive. They had both been paid over twice what I had bid.
Their writing was a revelation. The contractors either lacked the skills they boasted or they had done what I had not: scaled down the quality of their work to match the low pay.
Though I took responsibility for underbidding, I was annoyed. I wished I had known about the awful writing the other contractors had produced before I bid for the new job; I would have bid much higher.
I had always dreamed of being paid for my writing. I had never expected pressure to scale down my efforts to match payment. Apparently the game was to bid as high as possible while working as little as I could. But there was no way to do that without losing the aesthetic rewards of writing that made me love doing it.
The other contractors fit the popular definition of the word “amateurish,” as meaning inept and careless, but they were not the kind of amateurs who loved writing. I thought that, while they had spent less time on their work, I had enjoyed mine more. Yet the pay discrepancy, though my fault, created a feeling of unfairness.
It would be reaching to say that being paid hurts writing. After all, it was the inadequacy of the pay that created the pressure to under-perform. If I had been paid higher, maybe there would have been no conflict.
But even highly paid writers are routinely pressured to make artistic compromises that leech quality from writing. Writing well and making money are two entirely separate aims. They do not always converge.
I still look to my heroes Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury as beacons, as writers who made careers of writing but were still mainly driven by their love for the art of writing. Their motivation went beyond the shallow curiosity that the word “amateur” suggests, the “love” that pursues an art only out of boredom, as a way to pass the time.
But in my opinion, the love of a dabbler is no love at all. Someone who loves an art will go to any length to learn everything about it and strive for mastery, whether money is present or not. But for most writers, including me, making money is a practical necessity.
For that reason, I am always asking myself ironic questions such as: How can I get paid for writing and still love it? How can I be a professional yet retain the passion of an amateur?
How can I write for money, and still be happy?