Welcome to the latest in a series of essays here about how professional or aspiring professional writers can and must cope with two various kinds of rejection — rejection of your work by the buyers and rejection by various folks in the audience. 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 and Part 6 can be read here. Here comes Part 7…
This one's about writers who make a mistake that seems to me more common than you might think. It's when the writer does have opportunities but doesn't take them. He or she feels rejected but really has no one to blame but themselves and maybe some "friends" who aren't worthy of that noun.
There are lots of folks out there who want to be full-time professional writers and aren't getting the work or making the sales. Some of them try to keep up appearances of success by writing for little or no money. That usually doesn't work the way they hope it will. Working cheap or for free occasionally leads to getting paid decently but more often, it leads nowhere…or to more offers to work for little or no money.
When I was starting out, I sometimes made that mistake. One instance of several was when a publisher approached me about writing for a new magazine he was trying to launch. There was no money but the guy was not unconvincing when he swore on the graves of relatives who had not even died yet that when he could, he would pay Top Dollar. He seemed sincere and he also seemed like someone who could get his proposed magazine off the ground.
It looked to me like a decent gamble. It also looked like an impressive credit — the kind that might be read by some other publisher or editor who'd say, "Hey, I've got to get that guy to write for my well-paying magazine." This is usually very bad rationale for working for free and I don't think I really believed there was a genuine chance of that happening. I think at that stage of my career, I just wanted to see my work in print.
So I wrote for free, the magazine caught on briefly — and I'll give this to the guy: He kept his word about paying well once he could. He just didn't pay me or any of the other folks who'd labored for him for nothing. Once he could afford good rates, they went to "name" writers — the kind who didn't write for nothing and whose presence, he thought, would honor his publication. The magazine didn't last long and I'm uncomfortable with the fact that that still pleases me a little.
If you're having trouble getting paid for writing…well, I won't say you should totally avoid working for bad or non-existent money. There are times when it is a respectable gamble. But when you start feeling a little desperate, it's easy to delude yourself into thinking a bad risk is a promising one. When you start thinking, "This could turn my whole career around," you're probably kidding yourself. Recently, a writer I know told me, "Every time I work for free for the exposure, the most it does for me is to get me more offers to work for free for the exposure!"
General rule of thumb: Be wary of any offer that includes the word "exposure" unless it's working in a photographic darkroom.
Most of those are bad offers. Even if you're not making a satisfactory living as a writer, you should probably decline bad offers. And what you really shouldn't do is decline the good ones. Amazingly, there are under-earning authors and artists who do this.
It's sometimes a tricky thing to balance "I want to write because I love doing it" with the need to make a living…and by "making a living," I don't just mean paying this month's rent and gas bill. I mean creating a safe, healthy and reasonably-secure environment in which to live and work. That requires a certain amount of income. It might mean moving yourself past a couple of fears, one being that someone will think of you as a money-driven mercenary.
Most of us want to think of ourselves not as writers who write for money but as writers who do what we love and are fortunate that, usually, someone will pay us to do that. Onlookers may have trouble with that distinction but we understand it about ourselves. The problem is that it gives us a great area of vulnerability. We can be exploited by those who are willing to jab at that hot button.
I'm thinking now of a writer I know who has since largely given up writing. I've actually encountered several with this problem and also some artists and actors but I'll just talk about her. Her writing was fine. Her career management was not. She was too easily manipulated by a fear that her integrity as a writer would be questioned by anyone, even total strangers.
She'd write something. It would get to someone who was in a position to publish it or hire her to write something else and who wanted to. The potential publisher might say, "This is wonderful. This is a great piece of writing. This is an important piece of writing. This is a piece of writing that could help others. This is a piece of writing that could save lives."
She would be flattered and moved and delighted that the publisher wanted to publish it. Timidly — because she didn't want anyone think she was the kind of writer who only writes for the money — she would ask about, uh, maybe money?
The publisher would react one of several ways. Sometimes, he would say he didn't have any with which to pay her and if she was going to insist on money, well…that was a shame because it was such an important story, one which deserved to be published because it would help so many people. It might even help her because the exposure (there's that word again) would lead to great-paying offers. "I would hate for this wonderful story to go unpublished," he'd say. "But it's your right to demand money for it so…"
And she would quickly say, "No, no…forget about the money!"
Or sometimes, it was a publisher who couldn't deny he could pay but simply didn't want to. She'd mention compensation and the publisher would look at her askance — and maybe just that askance look would do it. Or maybe he'd add, "Well, I guess I misjudged the kind of writer you are…"
And she would quickly say, "No, no…forget about the money!" Or she'd accept something way lower than was appropriate. She worked for a lot of fly-by-night, unreliable outfits, including some who promised pay that never came.
Another problem was that she had "friends" who were also writers who were not doing too well in the profession. I put that word in quotes because they were the kind of friends who don't really want you to do well if it means you're doing better than they are. They were also poking at this tender area, telling her that financial success doing anything less than writing wholly from your heart was like selling your body on a street corner. One kept telling her, "Keep your artistic soul pure. Don't sell out."
The following story happened around 1978 and I guess it would help tell it if I gave her a name. We'll call her Wanda. She was, remember, very talented. She was probably a lot more talented than another writer she knew, a guy we'll call Eugene. They weren't close buddies but they often hung out together out of mutual problems. Both were writers who weren't getting paid much or anything to write.
One big difference between them: Eugene had way too much confidence in the utter wonderfulness of anything he wrote. Wanda didn't have nearly enough. I only met Eugene once in person but he spent the entire time telling me what a great writer he was — he quoted all these things that others had said about how superior his work was. He had an awful lot of such alleged quotes given how rarely he seemed to obtain paying work. (I admit to a prejudice in this area: When someone tells me how superb their writing is, I assume they're telling me that because they don't expect me to arrive at that conclusion based on the work itself.)
Wanda never did that. She did though call me for occasional pep talks and to tell me how her parents, well aware of her meager, unpredictable income, were urging her to give up this silly vocation and to get a non-writing job or husband. She was very much afraid she might have to do either if things didn't change soon.
So one day, I was offered a job I couldn't take. A division out at Disney wanted someone to write some educational films (today, we'd call them videos) in which the eminent Professor Ludwig Von Drake would teach basic science to kids in elementary schools. The project struck me as an interesting challenge — to communicate all that info but to find a way to make it entertaining — and the fee was decent. Had I the time to do it, I would have accepted that rate and there was a lot of this work to be done. But since I was too busy to do it just then, I recommended Wanda.
She went out to the Disney lot in Burbank, met with the folks in that department and left them samples of her writing. And though I wasn't there, I'll bet you she didn't tell them how wonderful it was and didn't quote others who said as much. She just left the pages, they read them and they offered her one of the films to write — and please understand that this was not "spec" writing. It was a thoroughly professional gig. She would be paid for it and if they liked it, paid for many, many more.
She wrote it, they liked it and they offered her many, many more. She turned them down.
One of the folks out at Disney called me, a little pissed that I'd sent them someone so "flaky." That was the word they used: Flaky. Wanda had not only turned them down but acted like they'd tried to trick her into doing something contrary to her best interests. "She was upset she'd even done the one," the Disney producer told me. "She told me it would 'corrupt' her creative integrity to write things like that."
I phoned Wanda and asked her what the hell she was thinking. She said, "I can't work for The Mouse. Disney is an evil, soulless corporation and I have to be true to my own writing. I can't be writing their work. I can't prostitute myself like that." This was from a woman who had maxed out her credit cards and though living quite modestly, was still spending more than she was taking in.
Overriding Rule for Writers: Do what you have to but pay your rent, your grocery bills and your power bill on time. Not since H.P. Lovecraft has anyone written anything of value if they were homeless, starving or sitting in an apartment without electricity.
It had taken her two days to write the script. I pointed out to her that she could write one of those a week to pay down her Visa card, then spend five days a week on her own writing. Nope. She said, "I can't allow myself to be the kind of writer who does that kind of thing." Then she thought to add, "I didn't mean you're that kind." Gee, thanks, Wanda.
That was pretty much the end of that possible job. She turned down others for similar reasons and before long, she was forced to take her parents' advice. I don't think she's written much of anything since about half-past the Reagan Administration.
Who had put this idea into her head that she was whoring if she worked for decent, dependable money for Disney? Eugene, of course. I figured that out when he called the next day. Though I barely knew him and had never read anything he'd written, he wanted me to put in a good word for him with that producer at Disney. I somehow don't believe I did.