Perspectives on writing for money

Although Mike and I both share a love of writing, we each got into it for our own reasons. As our professional lives developed, we’ve grown to share some insights on how ‘good writing’ is defined, categorized, and accomplished in today’s digital economies.

If I were to rewind the clock 15 years, our perspectives on writing would look much different than they do today. There is a certain excitement in the uncertainty that comes with being a Liberal Arts undergrad. In terms of modern industries, you’re not studying to become a specialist in anything. Starting a career requires more, much to the chagrin of accomplished and dedicated professors.

But, as we’ve found, those professors get the last laugh. Because while specializations evolve and become outmoded, there is always a market for creativity. In fact, as artificial intelligence and automation pick up more responsibilities traditionally assigned to humans, I believe creativity will be the only skillset we will have needed for all human history.

The Content Arms Race

I spent grade school learning the rules of writing and I spent my college years learning how to break them. I spent my early professional years discovering and ‘capitalizing’ on the innate, underserved, and universal need for creative writing in industry.

Indeed, right now, companies are waging a silent war across digital landscapes, vying for the attention of their would-be customers. That makes Mike and I mercenaries of sorts, feeding a growing thirst for copy that grabs the attention of buyers, differentiates brands from competitors, explains products and services in competitive ways, and, in the best cases, inspires readers to do something that is both different and good. Capitalism, like the Liberal Arts major, gets a bad rap these days, but you may be surprised how often we write to inform and inspire.

Since those early years, my personal vision of what a writer ‘is’ has changed. That includes just about everything a writer does on a given day after morning coffee. And yet, many of those original college-earned skillsets remain the same — ‘know your audience’ being perhaps the most important.

‘Know your audience’ and ‘write for your audience’ and ‘don’t write for yourself’ are some of the toughest hurdles to cross in the boot camp of academia. But when you’re writing for money, they are more important than any other skill you can master. They are more important, I would argue, than understanding the subject you’re writing about itself. If you think that sounds cynical, I disagree — because what good is a message if you don’t know the person receiving it?

The Value of Writing Lives in Your Audience

Soon into my writing career — which didn’t start immediately after college, I should note (not even close) — I discovered that the thing of value isn’t the length of your novel, the prestige of your publisher, or your byline in a magazine. It’s not even the accomplishment of finishing a given body of work. It’s the response you create in your readers, whoever they are.

Whether it’s inspiring someone to eat better, to think differently about how they talk to their kids, to acknowledge who makes their shoes and their clothes, or even to get them to buy something, the value of writing is in the reader’s response.

We buy novels because they give us value in the form of insights and stories. People pay me money to write online articles because it helps them sell their products. And people read those articles because it helps them decide what to buy.

In that way, it’s not important that your writing be celebrated, widely read, or even widely understood. Rather, what’s important is the impact your writing has on the audience it was written for, among those readers who happened to read it, within the context of the unique purpose for which it was created. We should all be so lucky to get paid to write and accomplish these things.  Fortunately, that just so happens to be the kind of value companies want to buy.

If that sounds obvious, you’re probably right. If that sounds like selling out to you, you’re probably right again. If you’re a writer, you define your success on your own terms. But I wouldn’t trade a career writing for money for just about any other career in the world.