#5 - On Writing for Money and Having Nothing at Stake
You don't need to wait until you've graduated--and you don't need to get a degree in writing--before you can write and publish a book. Yet I am glad that my younger self believed that she had to wait until she'd grown up to start working on her book, and that everything else she wrote until then was practice.
Because when you start practicing at 16 with that belief, you can take your time. There's no one you're accountable to; there's no one watching or waiting. And that is one of the best things you can have as a writer--this freedom of having nothing at stake.
It's not as if I didn't have any goals back then--I did fancy being published in literary journals--but my writing wasn't sustaining me in a way a person's job does. I was 16. Here in India, that means that you do nothing but study for your Board Exams in Class 12, the results of which will determine what college you can go to (and what society thinks about you, which is a different essay I'm never going to write). Unlike in the West, we're not expected to move out or make money. In fact, many students are actively discouraged from any extracurricular activities. My parents weren't so strict; they let me read my books and write because if there was one thing I was good at, it was getting good grades. We were struggling financially then as we are now, but because our culture doesn't expect young people to work, I wasn't expected to contribute to the family income.
At 16, this gave me a lot of freedom with my writing, a freedom I don't have at present, with all the loans I have to pay off. For three years, I wrote freely because I believed I won't be a "real" writer until I had my degree. After I switched to Psychology in college, I was even more liberated, because now I could write whatever I liked without ever worrying about things like writing a book and promoting it and getting published by literary magazines.
It was when I started reconsidering my writing as a potential source of income that this freedom vanished. I was young; there was still time before we'd move to the city where I'd be doing my postgraduate studies, and I had some savings from my first job, so I took the plunge into freelance writing.
I will write in the future about how I did so, what worked and didn't, and so on, but in this essay I want to focus on how this changed how I write. You see, this was early 2023. I'd finally discovered Substack, the disputed newsletter platform that had seen an upsurge in users over the last few years. A lot of writers were making a part-time or even a full-time income there.
And so when I started freelancing, I also launched a newsletter, thinking of it as another potential source of income. When your entire childhood has been one long ride of financial uncertainty, sources of income, even when you're not expected to have them, are always on your mind. This is a book about everything I know about writing, and if I have to be honest about why I write and what I write, then I cannot remove my financial circumstances from the picture; they have significantly shaped the writer that I am today. I would have been a very different writer had I been born rich.
So as fun and fulfilling it is to write, it is also not removed from money. In the preface to this book, I mentioned that I would be writing these essays as if I were talking to my younger self, and if there's one thing my younger self didn't see but needed to were narratives like hers, where the desire to write and the need to financially support one's family--a family that loves her unconditionally--are talked about honestly. So this, of all the essays I've written so far, might be the most personal, and the most directly addressed to a younger me.
My Substacks--I started two of them--were failures. Newsletters take time to build, and I couldn't wait months for this to work. Moreover, when you've grown up in the shadow of debts, there's a lot of shame that comes with the idea of asking people to become patrons. So even when I started those newsletters with the intent to monetise them, I couldn't do it for more than a month; I hated writing every single edition. On an exceptionally brave day I did manage to announce paid subscriptions for my second newsletter, but the writing became so difficult, and my mental health so terrible, that I deleted it too, and decided to focus all my energy on writing articles for online magazines and blog posts.
And for the past year, it has worked, although not consistently. Part of it is because making a living as a freelance writer isn't easy; part of it is because when you're used to writing what you want, exploring different genres and playing with words, it is difficult to switch to a mode where every word you write is, in a way, currency.
In the beginning, I briefly explored copywriting and content writing, which is the most common path writers take when they start freelancing. Then ChatGPT came into the scene and writers who once made a living from writing for companies and businesses started losing work. I was glad I hadn't chosen that path; I focused on writing for online magazines and blogs such as Vox, WIRED, Business Insider, Slate, Cosmopolitan and so on (although I still haven't been able to write for any of them). They paid "good" amounts--I'm in India, so an article bringing in $300 is like making an entire month's income from a single piece of writing.
These magazines published everything from heavily-reported articles to personal essays and opinion pieces. I read dozens of articles on their websites to understand the kind of writing they liked, and soon, I started looking at my life differently.
I dug through my shelves, I re-read my diaries, and I looked through pictures, trying to recall experiences and struggles that I could repackage into a personal essay, or an anecdote that I could then attach to a wider psychological phenomenon, such as imposter syndrome in young women or climate anxiety in teens. My entire life became a source of publishable material. It was incredibly dispiriting and shameful.
Not just my words, but even my memories and experiences became currency. I could write about that! And that! And that! I just had to shape it in a way that would please the magazines' editors.
And I really, truly believed this could work.
But it didn't. Even worse, I started hating my own life. I hated that my childhood had been financially uncertain--if only I could have continued my art or karate classes, if only I'd have joined a dance class, if only I'd learned badminton, and so on and so on. All those things I couldn't do because we couldn't keep paying the fees, and later in college, I spent all my time after classes tutoring kids to pay my tuition. I started hating my parents for the life they'd given me, because it was so deprived of potential writing material.
Of all the perspectives I've had over my 23 years, this was the worst, the most thankless--all my life I have given thanks for how supportive my family is, how unconditionally they have loved me, been there for me in moments of extreme loneliness. Even today, if I had to give up writing completely to be with my family, I would. Yet, when I entered freelancing, I'd let the need for money affect how I thought of the people I love the most in this world.
There is nothing wrong with writing things that are inspired by your real life--memoirs and personal essays have a huge audience these days--but beware of letting your writing, and your life, be ruined because of some external reward like money or validation. For years I wrote with nothing at stake. When money entered the picture, and when my words appeared to have the power to make me enough money to support my family, my writing suffered, my love for my family dwindled through no fault of theirs, and I started hating my life when, until I'd started freelancing, I'd always been grateful for it, despite the difficulties.
And so to be young or to not be dependent on your writing for an income is a great gift. If you can, take your time to first practice and develop the craft before attaching any stakes to it, be it publication in a literary magazine or writing a book or becoming a freelancer.
I love writing, and I would do it even when there's no money involved because it's something I'm compelled to do. But I also hope that writers and artists, especially the young ones, are able to find the time to play with their skills (and learn some other, practical ones too, because we all need to pay the bills and we must always, always have a Plan B). You can and should be able to make money from your work, but I hope you are able to do so in a way that does not steal the joy of writing from you, or worse, make you hate your life for not being "interesting enough" for readers.
And if you are in the same financial position that I'd been in, remember that your life is not a mine of material, that ideas can be found outside of you, that they can come from positive places like wonder and curiosity too. You can be a writer without writing about yourself.
If you have the freedom--and I know that many don't, because I didn't either--do things. Play. And then, if you want to, write about it. But do not look back and let money ruin for you that which you have loved all your life. As a young writer--as a person--that is one of the worst things you can do to yourself.