Sometimes people talk about earning money from their ability to write as a bad thing, as some kind of a sell-out, as though there is something intrinsically wrong with using their creative gift to sell toothpaste or toilet paper, elect a politician or promote a cause. Somehow, writers got the notion that it's an "either-or" situation: either you write what you want (poetry, fiction, essays, for example) or you write what the market needs (such as articles or advertising copy).
Well, as someone who has been writing for money since… well, for a lot longer than you might believe (let's put it this way—when I started, we didn't use computers!), I'm here to tell you it doesn't have to be a choice of the two but can be a combination of both.
I've written fiction and essays and published a book (The Gifts of Change, in case you're interested) — all of which came about because I had a passion to say something and that passion drove me to produce, regardless of whether there was money in it. But I have also written numerous magazine and website articles and handled lots of corporate projects. Did I always feel as passionate about those types of projects as I did for my other writing? To be honest, no. But in many cases, the topics were of interest to me and so I enjoyed the process of learning about them and interviewing those people who had a passion for that subject. And in interviewing those people, my own passion for writing was strengthened.
At the same time, there have been projects I have walked away from because I felt intuitively that something about the material or the people involved would be bad for me — a bad way for me to use my ability, a drain on my creative resources.
I am a practical person. I have bills to pay and have only my writing ability to rely on to pay those bills. At the same time, I know that it's important to me and for me to not use my writing ability just to "earn a buck," that I have to also find time in my schedule to write just for me, just on the topics that I want to explore, just in the genre that I know will feed my writing passion.
My point? There's nothing wrong with writing for money as long as somewhere, sometime, you find the time to also write for love.
2 comments:
Nancy - How funny . . . that was the theme of one of my talks yesterday at the writer's conference. That it's okay to also want to make money off of writing and some tips on how to do it.
Hi Kelly! Thanks for the comment. My feeling is, if we don't set a price on our abilities, then we run the risk of not valuing what we can do. Then no one else will either!
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