freelance

Something every writer has to deal with — and I do mean every writer — is rejection. Creative work is subjective to the Nth degree, and no matter what you will be rejected when you pitch ideas or submit work. In fact, I’ve experienced so much rejection in my own career success actually feels ominous to me. When I get turned down I sleep like a baby. When someone wants to buy a story I go on a bender and find myself at the bus depot, weeping and tearing at my clothes.

Infinite Variety

Rejection comes in many forms. There are, of course, those delicious rejection notes telling you with aggressive politeness that your work isn’t quite what the editors are looking for. There are the rejected pitches, which is usually an implied rejection in that the editor simply chooses not to buy it instead of explicitly rejecting it. There’s the peculiar joy of edit letters, where a story that was ostensibly not rejected gets such a heavy edit it’s almost the same thing. And then there’s the worst possible rejection — rejection after the fact, when you sell something and then the editor kills it for any number of reasons.

This is all great fun. But it’s part of the deal. When you try to put your work out there for money, you open yourself up to rejection. Learning how to deal with rejection is as important a skill as you can master in this business. You can’t let it get to you, or slow you down. Because if you do, you won’t get anything done.

Here’s how I deal with rejection. Your rejection is your own. You should give it a name and hug it to yourself when you sleep at night, and your way of dealing with it may be quite different — that’s okay.

1. Don’t linger. When I get a rejection — and again, I get a lot of them — I just mark it down and move on. I don’t think about it. At all. I don’t wonder why, I don’t analyze it, I don’t drink a bottle of whiskey and stare into the abyss. Or, yes, I do drink a bottle of whiskey, but for totally different reasons.

2. Get back in the saddle. When a story, novel, or pitch gets rejected, I immediately put it back on my list of things to submit. I aim to get it back into circulation as quickly as possible. I don’t care how many times something’s been rejected, because it only takes one person to buy it.

3. Wait a beat. Often, rejection comes with feedback. It’s tempting to read and digest that feedback immediately, but I recommend you wait. Reading feedback when you’re still upset from the rejection itself usually means you won’t be able to absorb whatever advice is contained in the rejection — or be able to tell good feedback from bad.

4. I drink. Heavily, sometimes.

Get used to rejection. The key is to realize that being rejected doesn’t mean you’re a bad writer, it just means you haven’t found a home for that particular piece yet. And maybe you never will, but that’s okay. Learning to keep moving forward in spite of rejection is probably the most important skill any writer can master.

That and appearing to be sober on Zoom calls when you’ve been drinking since 6AM. Of course.

Ah, freelanced writing: The ideal career for people who hate comfort and serenity. It combines a few terrible things with one awesome thing: You get constant change and a lack of security, constant nerve-wracking negotiation and the occasional dispiriting edit, but at the end of the day you get to write things for a living, and that is marvelous.

It’s also mysterious and opaque for a lot of folks, which inspires some magical thinking. One question I’ve seen frequently concerning freelance writing as a career concerns tools: Things like Grammarly or FocusWriter that either purport to make your work better or help you to work better.

There’s nothing wrong with using (or paying for) tools that legitimately help you, and experienced writers can make those decisions on their own. But the questions I’ve seen recently concern the need for these tools — as in, do you need certain tools to be successful as a freelance writer?

And the answer is simple: Absolutely not.

Read Moar Books

The idea that you can pay a subscription to the right service and instantly (and easily) improve your writing and/or your income is fantasy. Grammarly is often required by clients, and I understand why, but let’s be blunt: Grammarly is trash and at least 50% of its suggested revisions make your writing arguably worse (it does often catch boneheaded mistakes that can slip past a tired eye, so it’s not worthless — but it won’t transform your work in any meaningful or positive way, aside from apparently eradicating the phrase “in order to” from the English language, for some reason). And if you need help focusing, why not use an App or plugin designed to help you do so — but that doesn’t mean your work will be appreciably better as a result.

The only way to be a better writer is to read more. For fiction, that means books and stories. For freelance, it can be helpful to look at what other people are doing in your niche, especially folks writing for A-List web sites or mainline print venues. Study their tricks. Mimic their ledes. Just absorb it all as enthusiastically as you can — that’s how you’ll get better. All the Apps in the world won’t help.

Of course, once the next iteration of GPT-3 starts producing writing that doesn’t read as if it were written by your slightly creepy older cousin who spends their spare time reading the dictionary, we’ll all be redundant anyway. And, I assume, the phrase “in order to” will cease to exist.

Man, it’s hard out here for a freelance writer. The whole ‘digital nomad’ thing is sold as freedom, and it’s honestly a great career. But it’s like any other work — there’s hustle involved. Sometimes you get emailed out of the blue and a job lands in your lap, but sometimes you have to pound the digital pavement and stir up work.

One of the downsides of freelance work is the multitude of approaches, work cultures, tools, and philosophies you have to adapt to. In a regular job you settle in, learn how things work, and go about your business. Every new freelance job is a fresh hell of platforms, tools, style guides, and personalities. And that goes for the hiring process, too; while most freelance gigs require similar things (samples, resume, etc) there’s a bit of variety in the details, which can be maddening.

One detail that crosses from maddening to infuriating is an unpaid writing test. Which I encounter far too often. And which all writers should run from, hard.

In the Words of Logan Roy, Fuck Off

On the surface a writing sample or test seems reasonable. They just want to see if you can write, if you can follow their style guide and directions, how well you comprehend instructions. Sure! I get it.

But writing a 1,000-word piece takes time and thought and research and revision. Writers should be paid for their time, and if you can’t afford to pay me for a test piece you’re telling me you don’t value my time at all. And if you can’t afford to pay for test pieces, your business model and/or your hiring process sucks, and that is not my fault.

So, my advice to all writers is: Don’t do it. Unpaid tests or samples simply underscore the idea that your time as a writer is more or less valueless. Even if you get the job, the tone has been set, and a place that wants a free piece just to get your foot in the door is probably not done nickel-and-diming you.

Plus, I consume at least $15 worth of alcohol per 1,000 words. I have to at least break even on these things.

Working as a freelance writer isn’t all free drinks and suitcases full of cash. Actually, it’s neither of those things pretty consistently. What it is is a lot of work and the occasional perusal of ads from folks seeking professional writers, and many of these ads are rage-inducing. I’ve begun keeping a running list of words and phrases that will immediately cause me to back out of your ad and assume you are the worst.

Rockstar. When folks mention needing a ‘rockstar’ freelance writer,what they usually really want is someone who is willing to work with poor or absent direction, to tolerate insane demands and low wages, and somehow magically guess what the client is thinking at all times. The other side of this, of course, is that any problems are naturally your fault, for not being Rockstar enough.

Consistent Work. Translation: We pay peanuts but there are so many of them you might just scrape by. As long as you ‘consistently’ work 18 hours a day.

Plagiarism/Copyscape. Warning against plagiarism tells you immediately that this client is suspicious of the supposed value a writer brings to their business. They will probably also demand that you run your work through Grammarly, which is the same as asking your cat to proofread your work. Which I’ve done, when very drunk. I do not recommend this.

Simple/Easy/Straightforward. If they’re already gaslighting you on how much work is involved in the ad, just think how it’ll be when there’s live work to be done!

Unpaid. Whether its a sample project, a training period, or the job itself, if there’s no payment involved, they can go screw.

Revenue Sharing/Paid per click. It’s amazing that this still exists, honestly, but I’ve been fooled for a few seconds by decently-crafted ads that lead you down the primrose path to the dreaded revshare or PPC model, where you don’t get paid anything unless the article you’re writing gets enough clicks and traffic. Since it’s not my job to be an unpaid marketing guru for your site, that would be a hard no.

This is an evolving list, of course, but for the moment these are things that will make me nope the fuck out of any writing job. My life goal is to get to a point professionally where I turn down any job that doesn’t pay me in single malt Scotch. #careerGoals

I make a lot of my living as a freelance writer, which means people pay me to write all kinds of things. Some are fun and creative, some are … not. Some make me question my sanity, but as long as the check clears, I tend to get over it with the help of a nice dram of something brown and liquory.

I have one job that has pretty strict word counts, and involves taking a lot of material and research and boiling it down to that word count. Invariably, this means that my first draft of every piece is approximately five billion words over, and I have to start cutting.

And as a writer, you learn a lot about the mechanics of writing from cutting. You also learn how terrible you are at first drafts.

Everything is Terrible

I am old and wizened enough to remember when Twitter had a 140-character limit, and every tweet was an exercise in sculpting language. Trying to communicate nuance with 140 characters was tough, but as a result of that hellscape I now find 280 characters flabby. It’s too much space.

Cutting, of course, is a skill. You don’t have to read the infinite ‘restored’ version of The Stand to know that writing without limits has its downside. And that’s why my freelance gig with the hard word counts is actually good for me. Taking 1,200 flabby words and cutting them into a diamond-sharp 600 word gem isn’t always easy, but it usually requires that I consider every sentence–every word. I have to justify every word, every phrase, and think about whether I can say the same thing in fewer words.

Usually, fewer words is more powerful writing.

As an experiment, I’m thinking of trying to write a novel with a preset word count. Something borderline, like 55,000 words. A big, epic story whose first draft is going to be 150,000 words, and then try to go through every line and cut out more than half of the words, just to see if what’s left is a razor-sharp story or a skinny mess.

Because I’m starting to think the main test of a writer is cutting the words down to the bone, and then cutting some more, and somehow still ending up with exactly what you wanted.

For example, this post was originally 6,700 words long, including a lengthy middle section in which I confessed to my crimes. You’re welcome.

This article got me thinking.

On the one hand, it purports to be a long read on how journalism is being killed by the gig economy. But I’m not the only one who saw instead someone complaining that they can’t make more than $20K a year writing book reviews and rambling essays like this (which he got paid $1K for, which is about 50 cents a word, which ain’t bad for something requiring zero research).

Here’s the thing: If you want to make a living as a writer, you should get comfy with the idea that sometimes you’re gonna have to write stuff you’d rather not write.

Sex Toys and One Direction

When my day job and I, er, got a divorce, and I convinced The Duchess that I could make money doing freelance writing (a feat I may never equal in terms of sheer improbability), I had no idea how to proceed. Being the author of some admired SFF books and a slew of short stories didn’t mean I had a phone full of editor contacts I could tap for lucrative assignments.

Like a lot of folks, I imagined I knew what freelance writing was: I’d send out some emails suggesting topics to a few editors, someone would buy one and offer me some immense amount of money, and then I’d write this long article. I’d do this a few times a year and be comfortable.

I’m sure some writers manage to do that, but … not me. I didn’t even know where to start, so I found content mills, where you can get some very terrible writing work without trying too hard. I had bills to pay, and a wife to impress. I didn’t have two years to figure it out, I needed an income immediately if not sooner. So I took anything I could get. I wrote blog posts for a penny a word. When I made it to two pennies a word, I was depressed as hell but kept going. I wrote catalog copy for sex toys. I ghostwrote a blog about One Direction.

I didn’t want to write any of this, and I certainly didn’t want to write it for two fucking cents a word. But I did, because it was work. And I slowly found my way to better jobs. I worked steadily and got more clients and better-paying clients until I was finally able to quit the really awful jobs and establish myself, and it was all a messy mix of luck and doing the work. I wrote stuff I didn’t want to, because it was my job, not some genteel dream I could indulge.

Even today, when I make quite a lot more than two cents a word, I still write a lot of stuff I’d rather not. Because it’s a job.

Of course, some writers do better. Some cold-pitch like wizards and land in glossy magazines their first try. Some people are better than me. Some are better at networking, or luckier, or more privileged. I accept that; I’m not the smartest man in the room and just because I toiled in the lower hells of freelance writing for a few years doesn’t mean there isn’t a better way. But I do know this: No matter how successful you are as a writer, the fundamentals still apply: Do the work.

Freelance writing can be a tough gig sometimes. Aside from the way your skin starts to glow in the darkness because you haven’t left your cave-like office in months, or the way you start to refer to everything as your Precious, there’s the uncertainty and instability of your income. There’s a lot of feast and famine in freelancing in general, and the fact that you don’t have a boss or a job is both powerful and terrifying. In theory, after all, you can easily tell crazy clients to go fuck themselves. In practice, of course, the idea of telling a paying client to take their money elsewhere often seems insane. What if you can’t make up the difference? What if you wind up living on the street—or, worse, forced to drink well whiskey—all because you decided that you didn’t want this money?

Here’s the thing, though, sometimes getting rid of a client actually results in more money.

Less is More

Not all freelance jobs are the same. Some require a lot of effort for modest pay, some pay you exceptionally well for something you can can up with in your spare time with, like zero effort. And most of us freelancers have a client list that’s made up of a range between those two extremes.

I had a small client. It wasn’t the hardest work in the world, and it didn’t pay very well, but for a long time I was loathe to ditch them. The work wasn’t hard, but it was time consuming the way all work is—it took hours away from my other work. So, I eventually fired the client—in a nice way.

And something weird happened: I made more money. I had more time to devote to other clients—better-paying clients—and not only did I not miss the client I ditched, I prospered. And sometimes that’s the lesson. Be willing to trim back the bad jobs. If you have an old client that’s paying you your rate from 3 years ago and isn’t willing to give you a raise, don’t convince yourself that you can’t get rid of a paying client. Take a chance and I’ll bet you wind up doing better.

Of course, that doesn’t mean you fire every client. Or even several. Just concentrate on the outliers, the small accounts that stand out due to their low rates. And if you don’t have any such clients, just keep in mind the ultimate lesson here: Freelancing is all about selling time, and sometimes getting time back from a client is the smart thing to do.

Another smart thing to do? Buying Apple stock in 1995, or mining Bitcoin in 2011. Dammit.

The title of this blog and the book I’ve written is Writing Without Rules, so naturally enough I’m going to talk a bit about a writing rule, and how it changes over time.

The thing about a lot of writing advice, whether it’s about career or craft, is that rules change meaning over time, depending where you are in both. For example, a good rule of thumb for freelance writing is to never say no.

No Habla No

When you’re first starting out as a freelance writer, this advice is good because you need the one thing you don’t have: Clips. You need to get experience, examples, and to prove that you can hit deadlines and write to someone else’s style guide. You need jobs, so you really shouldn’t be too picky unless you have the platform and/or connections to just dive into well-paying, high-profile work.

That’s solid advice when you’re just starting out, but what about when you’ve advanced your career a little and you have more choices? Surely you have to start saying no to low-paying jobs, or jobs that involve subject matter or workflows you don’t enjoy?

Yes, that’s true. But the rule of Never Say No doesn’t go away—it changes. I argue you still shouldn’t say no to jobs. You should instead decide how much money it would take for you to do it. In other words, saying no ends the conversation. Saying, I’ll do it, but you’re going to have to pay me a mint might have the same effect but it keeps your options open.

Say an old client you used to write boring catalog copy for a penny word contacts you; they have a dull writing project and they want you to help out. Your instinct is to say no—you make too high a rate now, and you’re writing about subjects you enjoy—why would you ever go back? But instead of saying a flat no and ending the conversation on a sour note, think about what they would have to pay you to make it worthwhile. A dollar a word? Two dollars? Don’t get into the weeds of whether or not it’s a reasonable ask, or whether or not they’ll accept it. Once you decide the rate you’d need to take the work you can’t lose: If they turn down your pitch, you didn’t want it anyway, and if they accept you’re getting a ton of money.

Best of all, even if they turn you down they don’t think of you as the person who simply laughed at their job, they think of you as someone who’s out of their price range.

To do this at a Somers level, of course, you have to go beyond your per-word rate and demand the client supply free whiskey and address you as Lord Somers in all correspondence. So far no one’s taken me up on it, but a guy can dream.