Hey, everybody! It's Part 11 in my series of articles about how writers can deal with no one wanting to pay them to write. Part 1 can be read here, Part 2 can be read here, Part 3 can be read here, Part 4 can be read here, Part 5 can be read here, Part 6 can be read here, Part 7 can be read here, Part 8 can be read here, Part 9 can be read here and Part 10? Well, Part 10 can be read here. Part 11 can be read right after I skip a line…
There. Here we are at Part 11 and this time, let's talk about money. Writers need to make money. That might seem obvious but it apparently isn't to the myriad of people we encounter who expect us to write for them for little or no cash because, after all, we're artists and we are primarily motivated by passion for our work and a burning need to express ourselves. Nary a week goes by where someone doesn't approach me, trying to finagle me into writing something for little or no remuneration. Here is a list of key points that writers need to remember about their profession…
- It is vital to make a decent living, one which allows you and your loved ones (if any) to live in a safe environment with sufficient food, medical care and other necessities of life.
There are other key points but that one's so important that I'm going to skip the others. You need those things I just mentioned and you also need some bucks in the bank for emergencies or lean times — oh, and clothing might be nice, too. And maybe a car and gas to run it. And the tools with which to write and you can probably think of other must-haves. The fact that you're a professional writer — or someone who longs to be one — does not change that. Not in any way. If you're nervous that you won't sell the script you're now writing, just think unsettling your sleep will be if a non-sale of that script would cause you to lose your home.
It should not come to that. When you're on the ledge is when you're liable to make really, really bad career decisions. As a writer, you'll probably get lots of offers you should decline. You should say no to insulting pay rates and to projects for which you have zero passion. You should especially turn down those Jobs From Hell where you'll be working for some guy who combines the worst traits of the Tasmanian Devil, Vlad the Impaler and Phil Spector. That's why you need money in the bank. You can't pass on a job when they're dangling the bucks you need to not get evicted this week.
There may also be times in your life when you want to work on a play or a novel or some idea you have which could result in the creation of something wonderful which you'll then go out and try to sell. To write that dream project, you may need to turn down some paying work, which may mean living for a time off your savings. You can't live off your savings if you don't have savings.
So do not be afraid of making money. Money can be very empowering. For one thing, it frees you from having to worry about money.
Now, am I suggesting that if you're a writer and you aren't making enough to live on, you go get a job waiting tables or selling pants or driving for Uber? Well, that might not be the worst idea in the world but wouldn't it be better to get a job writing?
Not being able to pay your bills as a writer may not be a problem of talent as much as of timing. Some publisher might read that spec novel of yours next week, decide you're the next Stephen King and agree to lay a big advance on you. Or it might be eighteen months before you connect with that person and he gets around to reading it…oh, and the advance will be paid six months later. I just thought of another key point that writers need to remember about their profession…
- The money almost always takes longer to arrive than you'd like and longer than you'd expect. This is obviously true with shady or underfunded producers and publishers but it's also true of honest ones who are flush with cash.
Right there's another reason why you shouldn't try to live from check to check. I knew a writer years ago who was owed a huge, six-figure payment from Universal Pictures. No one disputed it was due him or questioned the amount. It just somehow took six weeks for someone there to issue the check and during that time, he had to borrow money to live on until it arrived.
If you have to go look for a job because you don't have a check like that en route to you, why not look for a writing job? One that may not be what you eventually want to do but which can keep you solvent until you get to it?
When I started out, I wrote for local magazines. I wrote press releases for a publicist. I wrote one semi-naughty novel under a fake name. I wrote speeches for people who were willing to pay to have speeches written for them. I ghost-wrote some advertising work for another writer I knew. It was not the kind of writing I wanted to do but it was writing.
Then I began writing comic books…and yes, I know there are folks reading this who'd think they'd found their calling if they could write comic books 'til they were as old as Stan Lee but this was 1970. Comics then didn't pay that well and the folks who'd then been doing them for most of their lives didn't seem all that happy about it or properly rewarded. Even Stan Lee then wasn't too happy about it or properly rewarded. It was a great job for me though. I was fast and I was learning and I was still living with my parents and I was young and I was getting my work published in a professional situation and I never had to wait tables or stock shelves or run a deep fryer.
I'm not in any way knocking people who do do those jobs. It's just that if your goal is to be a writer, most non-writing jobs don't get you any closer to that goal. The less glamorous/lucrative writing gigs do however give you some money and also some experience writing. You learn about how to set up your work area. You learn how to pace yourself at the keyboard or whether it helps you to write out things in longhand first. You get practice formulating a sentence in your head and then transferring it to the manuscript. You learn that you write better when you arrange your day so you go to bed early and get up early to write…or write until early in the morning and then sleep 'til 3 in the afternoon.
Also, I think there's a skill to meeting a deadline — learning how to budget your time, learning how often to take a break, etc. You can cultivate a sense of when it's going too slowly or too rapidly. If it's going too slowly, you may not have time to keep to that pace. If it's going surprisingly swiftly, you may need to pause and decide if the speed is because you're really, really in the zone or really, really off-course. It's probably one or the other.
I learned — and this is just me I'm talking about here — that it didn't work to write out much of an outline or even notes for myself; that I had to work it out in my head and store it there. I can't tell you why but that's the way I learned I did my best work. I'd think through my story, often during a long walk, and get it to a certain stage of completeness. Only then could I sit down at what was then a manual typewriter and begin filling the paper. There was such a thing as thinking it through insufficiently and there was also such a thing as too much. I developed an instinct as to when I had the right level.
That level changed over the years as I got a better sense of my own strengths and weaknesses and it changed a lot more when I segued into writing on a computer. But the point is I had to know how to figure out where I was doing to go and roughly how I was going to get there before I began putting things down in what I hoped would be their final form.
And then there was the most serious thing of all, perhaps: I had to develop a sense of when what I was putting on the paper was going nowhere or was not up to whatever standard I wished to meet. I had to be able to sense I'd made one or more wrong turns and I had to learn to make the sacrifice of figuratively (sometimes, literally) tearing up the last few pages or maybe even all of them. That is sometimes a hard thing for any writer to do, especially when you think there's some good stuff in there and now no one will ever read or hear it.
None of this is unique to me. Every writer has to go through certain areas of self-discovery and to find out how best to do what they want to do. I know writers, many of whom I respect a lot, who do their work in ways that seem alien to me.
They get up at dawn and never write after the sun goes down. Or they have to physically leave their homes and go to an office somewhere to write. They require certain music playing at a certain volume. Or they demand absolute silence. They need the phone turned off and little chance of interruption. Or they need to not have the sense of total isolation that can come from being totally isolated. They write out long pages by hand on yellow legal pads, then edit and refine as they type it into their computers. Or they can't write on Microsoft Word, they have to use some version of Wordstar from the Bronze Age with certain tab stops and margins. I even know a few writers who can't use computers at all and so produce magic on the kind of primitive manual typewriter that I wrote on at age 14.
There's nothing wrong with any of that…if it works for you. As a writer, you no doubt have one or more dream assignments — things you want to write, jobs you want to get. If and when you get a shot at them, you'd better have all the basics mastered. That is no time to be figuring out how to set up your office or to learn Movie Master Screenwriter or how to write out an outline for yourself.
Now, you may notice that in this piece, I have subtly changed topics on you. It started out to be a piece about how as writer, you need to earn a comfy living and not always be worrying about your electricity being turned off or the Visa people sending a S.W.A.T. team over to surround your home and order you to throw their credit card out the window. It has since morphed into an essay about the importance for a writer to become comfy and efficient writing and to learn how to be productive and meet a deadline.
I did that little switch because I think these are two problems with the same solution: If you can't get the writing position of your dreams, get a lesser one to tide you over. Find a magazine to write for or find an ad agency that needs someone to whip up press releases or go out and write porn (a lot of successful writers have at one time or another) or write pamphlets or ad copy or training manuals or whatever else may be out there.
If you think it would be embarrassing, you don't have to put your name on it, don't have to tell your friends about it. Just make sure it pays and it would also be good if it requires you to write something — anything — and to deliver it on a timely, professional basis.
Don't think of it as admitting defeat because you aren't writing major motion pictures or showrunning a hit TV show or getting your plays produced on Broadway. Think of it as temp work that can help you out financially for a while and prevent you from having to take a job that does not relate in the slightest to what you really want to do. The money from that temp job might save your home and give you enough of a safety net that you can spend more time writing and less time fretting over bills. And the disciplines and experience of that temp job just might help you to someday use that more writing time to write that major motion picture, showrun that hit TV show, get those plays produced on Broadway…