There Are Hundreds of Ways to be a Writer. You Pick What’s Best for You.

It’s caring about it that counts.

If you’re thinking about becoming a writer, you’re in luck. The Internet is replete with information from writing gurus about how to make money off words, and if you’re lucky, they won’t take you for more than $99 per Gumroad ebook. Get a few clients and a few viral posts, and you could become one of those gurus yourself! (Or just be an affiliate for the guru you bought the writing ebook from and get easy money without having to worry about which Notion template looks nicest.)

When it comes to “non-profitable” forms of writing, it gets trickier. Most online writing courses revolve around the conventional writing business narrative — that one’s writing must, by default, bring money, either directly (as a service, e.g., freelance writing) or indirectly as a way of marketing something, usually a course or ebook. Quality resources on fiction, poetry, or creative nonfiction aren’t widely available, which means practitioners in those genres need to either attend a writing course/degree programme or figure things out on their own.

To some extent, I get it. Course creators might hesitate to require payment for something that won’t really translate into monetary returns. There will be takers, but far fewer than for things like freelance writing, which the student can convert into their own paying career and would thus be willing to invest in.

What I don’t get is the prescriptiveness a lot of those course creators have — wherein they sneer at people who write for art and not money and over-extol the virtues of writing content that sells. “Any other way is stupid,” they imply politely and repeatedly.

As a fiction writer, this gets my goat.

Now, to clarify — some of my writing does bring me money. I’ve chosen freelance B2B writing as my day job, and I have paid for resources to become better at B2B writing.

But also, a big part of my day goes on a form of writing — literary fiction — that will almost never bring me money but which requires intense and prolonged focus.

Which means — obviously — that I can’t take on as many freelance clients as I theoretically could have. Which means I will never make as much money as those who write only professional content.

According to writing gurus, that’s a mistake.

I’ve read articles by writing experts I look up to hugely where “pretty writing” is looked upon as a way to starve while telling people your book is in Barnes & Noble. I dislike the sanctimoniousness of “money doesn’t matter,” but equally do, I dislike this rating scale where an activity’s worth is measured by how much money it brings in. Sure, my literary writing won’t make me rich. I could, in theory, stop writing fiction and double or triple my freelance work. But if I did, I’d be miserable. And that misery would cost me in more ways than just money.

I do get advocating what you’re selling. The writing gurus have made a living off business writing, and it’s natural they’d focus on why business writing works. But why tear down other kinds of writing in the process? Here on Medium, I write about the art and process of writing literary fiction, but I’m not going to call out the writing of history textbooks as a waste of time either.

And to writing gurus who do this — if you need to hate on other subjects to sell your own agenda, what you’re selling probably isn’t all that good anyway.

I write fiction because I’m heeding a call to create art. But your reasons for writing could be entirely different.

• Maybe you write essays on climate change or war crimes because those are causes you believe in.
• Maybe you’re documenting the life of a little-known shrub or insect.
• Maybe you’re archiving your family’s holiday recipes or traditional remedies.
• Maybe you write a weekly advice column in your local paper.
• Maybe you write fairy stories to tell your kids.
• Maybe you write songs for the local band you’re a part of.
• Maybe you write fanfiction about book and movie characters who mean something to you.

Maybe writing isn’t even something you do every day. Maybe writing for you is a happy passion project that you work on twice a week with sincerity and love before going back to your regular job.

And I’m here to tell you that that’s absolutely okay.

This might sound odd coming from me. I’ve often written about my fiction writing and how deadly serious I am about writing every day in a relentless pursuit of perfection.

But I have felt the impacts of gatekeeping myself, and I see that others are gatekept for not conforming to what a “true writer” ought to do (and believe me, this happens in literary circles, too, and I’m just as annoyed about that). The whole point of writing is to express your story in your way, and it’s a sad world where that fundamental freedom is questioned. Writers have a hard enough job as it is — at the very least, we should be able to craft our craft the way we want without having to feel shame about how much money it’s bringing in.

So the next time you see an “expert” telling you what kind of writer you ought to be — ignore them. If you care about your writing, and if you’re giving it the best you can, and if you’re working towards outcomes that make you happy, you’re good.