Who or What Are You Writing For? Redux
In the battle for bucks and balls (as in eye balls, that is) who wins? Let’s talk.
Just before I got my afternoon conference call with a client and co-conspirator, I published this:
No, you don’t have to read it. That’s not the point. The point is that, as is my habit, I also immediately published it on Newsbreak. Within moments, two things happened.
First, my lovely editor over at Living Out Loud, Kim Petersen, commented on the Medium piece:
This is amazing, Julia. I got the chills xKindly, that’s not bragging. I’ll explain in a sec here.
Over on Newsbreak, they were so enthusiastic about my content they gave me a Content Value, or CV, of one out of ten. In other words, almost, but not quite, whale shit, honey. We think your content is crap.
One, I can take to the bank, and I care. No really, I mean it. Kim’s comment made my whole day.
The other, really? This is what your AI, which is an oxymoron, says about a piece that has the power to move people to chills, says about my writing?
This was such a picture-perfect example of what happens when you let an online platform like Newsbreak lead you around by the unmentionables in search of Big Bucks that I couldn’t help but make a point for those of us who want to write for living.
Or at least, for a while.
Okay, for an hour.
When I started over at NB I had a few pieces nearly go viral, with all the attendant sewage-comments that a high-profile piece gets. Since that initial hubub, my analytics look like a guy who had a series of heart murmurs, a heart attack or three, then is slowly but surely dying. Still on life support.
After I got started over on Newsbreak, suddenly there are all these changes. Oh, now we really only want local content. Oh, we have a rating system which we will sort of kinda explain, but not really. We can’t tell you what we think is worth a CV of ten, but we know what we like when ( our AI) sees it. Never you mind now.
It has continued to be the case that what my NB readers like best isn’t what NB’s AI system likes best. So when I looked at my updated earnings for Newsbreak after the initial grand a month, they now look like what most of us suffered through our first year on Medium (and have returned to but I digress). Pennies, kinda like unemployment without the government boost.
Meanwhile you could write and struggle to live up to a set of loose, poorly-defined standards to get a higher CV score while you may not exactly be writing what you’re really passionate about because you focus more on money. Sometimes we have to, but as with all things, it depends. Writing is a business, and there are tradeoffs.
If you are determined to become a pro, at the risk of repeating myself ( I don’t care, I’ve had concussions), do the work, take the classes, hire an editor who will doodle bright red lines all over your precious words until you bloody well start writing like you have a brain cell. Then write and write and write and tear it all up and do it again. And read and read and read. Rinse repeat. Good writing is a lifetime endeavor. And if you have the conceit to write fiction, and make money from it, well, lifetime journey. We are never “there.” We are forever becoming. Even Hemingway knew that. The best ones do. They are forever humbled by how far they still have to go to be great.
Putting in your time on these platforms is excellent grunt work, especially if you attend to comments (not on Newsbreak), practice your grammar, listen to feedback and don’t write purely for outrage. That is part of becoming a good creator.
If you don’t care about becoming a pro there are plenty of places which are happy to manipulate your time and energy for pennies. Newsbreak, to my mind, is one of those places, although plenty of people who do not write in my lanes do quite well. Each platform seems to draw a particular kind of reader profile. You’re the one who has to determine if that platform is for you and if you’re willing to align yourself with what they want to get what you want, if what you want is, simply, to get paid. Newsbreak, in all honesty, is far more interested in how hard you’re willing to work to hoover eyeballs to their site. Not to YOUR website, their website.
I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. Simply, I am throwing out the question. If writing is your art, that begs a different set of questions.
Here’s a way to think about this. The first time I ever traveled to Durango, Colorado, I explored one of the quaint galleries which lined the main street at the time. I spotted a ceramic “dead” mouse doorstop. The gallery owner told me that the artist, who had sold thousands of them, was no longer willing to make any more. Her reason was that she was bored sick of making dead mice. She had become nothing more than a mouse manufacturing facility. She was so consumed with mice-making that she no longer had time to explore her other creative pursuits,which would have allowed her to grow as an artist.
Two ways to think about this:
First, it doesn’t have to be all or nothing. If you, like this artist, have found a paying outlet, and you need the money, you don’t shoot yourself in the foot. You keep the paying outlet, but stay mindful that it doesn’t overwhelm your entire life and prevent you from doing anything else.
Second, if you can, try to manage your paying gigs into 80% of your work. The other 20% is your play time. An artist friend used to do this when her business was still quite young. She showed her goods at all the local pottery events and art shows. Studied what people bought (cups, bowls, plates, saucers). She always produced enough of what people consistently bought to pay her bills, but retained 20% of her time to get creative. Those creative pieces sometimes took off, such as a very large wall totem which retails at close to a grand. They made their way into museum gift shops. Meanwhile, she paid for a ranch, a herd of racing horses, a house, and college for two kids with her “dead mouse” work, if you will. She was first and foremost a business person, and she managed her creative work as a business.
Which means she knew precisely how much work she needed to put in to pay the bills and feed the fam, and how much leeway she had to experiment, fail, and create something that spoke to her soul. She was one of the few successful artists I ever met because she was a business woman whose business was art. That’s an important distinction. It is also why now, in her mid-seventies, she continues to produce increasingly fabulous work, and her pieces are in demand everywhere. She still produces the “chop wood carry water” kitchen stuff, but now she has more time to spend on items like the totem, which are very high end, and with much more pricey galleries, which showcase those high-end pieces. That takes time and hard work and good business practices.
I have a cousin named James Hubbell who, many years ago, built a fascinating art house in Julian, California. We met in the mid 80s. By that time, he’d gotten quite famous for his work for the Palace Doors of Abu Dhabi. We spent some time at his incredibly quaint house, and I asked him these very questions. He told me that when we do our creative work solely for money, it sucks the life out of what we do. The question for him at least was whether we were doing our art for art’s sake, as a statement of the soul. I guarantee you that his Abu Dhabi commission to design eighteen doors for that palace didn’t happen because he made dead mice because they sold.
He produced work that soared. Now at 86, people pay a lot to visit his quaint and fascinating houses on those California hills. His doors are famous. Rightly so.
That’s my point. Whether you and I are a writer, a sculptor, doesn’t matter. We do have to deliver what people want, but we also have the sacred duty to follow our passion and give it rein. The more willing you are to do the solid work of finding the lane that people will pay for, the more able you are to explore fiction, or provocative topics which feed your soul.
Understanding that this is a business and you have to manage yourself as one as opposed to the romantic (but foolhardy) “starving artist” arc is what will get you solidly on your feet over time. So should you write for Newsbreak? I dunno. What’s your lane? Who’s your market? Why do you write? Are you willing to produce what they want to pay for what you want? While doing that for Newsbreak (Medium is vastly more forgiving, if not outright supportive, although not generous), you cannot in any way promote yourself. As a business, are you willing to forfeit that promotional value in order to get paid for promoting Newsbreak? Not my call.
For my part because of where I am on my writer’s arc,
Kim’s comment is what I care about.
I care about someone who reads something I write and it twangs a deep, responsive chord and they say holy shit, this is talking to ME. When I get comments like that, it tells me that I am growing as an artist. That my willingness to speak from the soul is making a difference.
That is why I write, that is why I do adventure travel and take risks. That. The risks I take and the adventures I do feed my writing, for they speak to what happens when we live vividly. When your words invite a new way of seeing, for me, that’s the payoff. That kind of work, dragged right out of the depths of my heart, is what gets me much better gigs.
Because it’s not work I grind out to chase a nebulous CV score. Work that is dictated by mindless AI, which can’t tell a richly emotional piece from a proctologist’s report.
Each of us as writers gets to choose how we want to wield our skill. Money is an issue for each of us, unless we married well, or at least we married someone who continues to be gainfully employed (that wouldn’t be me). So finding a way to make a living with words is still an entrepreneurial endeavor, and you have to be able to run a business, and deliver on your brand promise. Which means you need a brand, and a promise. And proof you can deliver. That proof is, again, the chop-wood-carry-water part of building our skills, publishing, learning, practicing, improving.
Medium writer Sharon Hurley Hall writes a lot about the business of writing, and I commend you to her work. She’s not alone, but she has been building her business and her craft steadily. I recommend you read her stuff. She treats this like the business it is, and her advice is solid. She also recently penned a piece on moving all her Medium articles over to Substack. For people who are frustrated with Medium, and for whom Newsbreak is just not the right fit (which I suspect is where I will be in a few weeks), you might want to give her articles a serious read.
My cousin James was willing to sacrifice a good bit of creature comfort to deliver, and he soared. The mouse maker? I’ve no idea. My dearest hope is that she is living somewhere wonderful making something wonderful which allows her to soar. It most certainly is not dead mouse doorstops, but to be fair, her willingness to make a lot of them likely allowed her to move on to her next endeavor.
As for you and me, each day we decide how to expend our creative energy. If we’re wise we realize that a portion of that energy, unless we’re independently wealthy or otherwise gainfully employed, needs to focus on bringing in the bacon. Or, if you’re vegan, the organic bread. The rest, we nurture quietly, passionately, and allow that voice freedom. Bit by bit as we get better, we may well find ourselves tapped for a palace project, like my cousin James.
For my part, I focus on touching the hearts of my readers, and whether NB’s AI happens to like or not, I can say, Go Spit. Because just yesterday afternoon I believe I nailed one hell of a contract, which I most certainly would not have nailed had I solely focused on manufacturing dead mice stories for pennies.
Just saying.
