Writing for Money
So money will make you happy. Really?
On any given day, scroll through the articles on Medium and you will come across several telling you how to earn more money on this site, or as a writer in general. It is not advice that is unique to the world of those of us who put pen to paper. The desire for more permeates our society to quite frightening levels, especially when you consider that most of us are living in some of the wealthiest countries in the world.
In a recent survey, 89 percent of Americans polled said that as a nation, the US was too materialistic. Coincidently, the same amount of people said they wanted more. The sad truth is that most of us will die without ever having believed we had enough. Not that we are hungry or want for a roof over our heads. We have simply managed to convert our wants into needs and failed to recognize what we already have. We seem to have a gift for looking one step up the social ladder and a blind spot when it comes to looking downwards.
An interesting study of lottery winners was done by Dr. Ronnie Janoff Bulman. The study involved 22 winners of large lotteries, 22 average people and 29 people who had become victims of accidents or illness in which they had become unexpectedly paralyzed. Within a fairly short space of time, the lottery winners had reverted to their pre lottery levels of happiness and were no happier than the average people. Those who had become paralyzed, on the other hand, reached a point where they were more easily able to extract pleasure from small and simple things.
Science tells us that when we acquire something new, we receive a temporary thrill, but that this soon subsides. We very quickly begin to see all we have as an entitlement. A Gallup poll found that people thought that 21 percent of the population were rich. A mere 0.5 percent thought that they were rich.
As I read some of the articles on Medium, I recognize many of these symptoms. The focus for some seems to have moved from creation to acquisition, and I am not sure if, in that shift, we haven’t lost something. I have been writing professionally for about ten years. It makes up about half of my income (more this year because of COVID) and the other half is made up from selling crafts that I make. The combined income brings in enough money to make a living but little more. That, however, is a choice. I could earn much more elsewhere but I have chosen to make a living through my creative endeavours.
I make my crafts using recycled materials such as driftwood, old cans and discarded car tyres, and there is a certain thrill to be gained from taking other people’s discarded items and repurposing them for a profit. It is the writing however, that brings me the most pleasure. There, the creative process starts without the luxury of rusty tin and battered pieces of wood. In essence, we writers require nothing more than a pen, paper and an open mind. With just dust and ashes, we seek to make something readable and occasionally even saleable.
The moment that money starts to become too big a part of the equation, we surrender something. We start to lose sight of the journey and focus on the destination, and I am not sure that that is good for our writing. I believe that if we could train ourselves to focus more on the journey and less on the material rewards we hope to achieve, we would produce better quality work. That requires a paradigm shift in the way we look at what we do. We are forced to recognize that no matter how much we get paid, it will never be enough. Money will never satisfy that desire for more because, by nature, we are insatiable.
The satisfaction needs to come from the creative process itself. The above statistics suggest that they are unlikely to come from the material rewards we may or may not garner. We are more than just physical beings and therefore we require more than just a material reward to achieve satisfaction. Just as the victims of sudden paralysis opened their eyes to small pleasures in their lives, we need to train ourselves to take pleasure from lining up words on a blank piece of paper.
I am not suggesting that we should all don camel hair shirts and live on grasshoppers. We all have overheads that need to be met. Nor am I suggesting that this is a phenomenon that is unique to writers. The world seems to suffer from an overabundance of entitlement.
The good news is that with a little bit of effort and self-discipline, we can train ourselves to see what we already have and tear our eyes away from what our neighbours have. I am sitting here pecking away at my keyboard. In a few hours, I will wander down to my workshop and make something vaguely saleable for tomorrow’s market. As yet I have no idea what it will be. Down the road from me, people sit in the same offices they have sat in for years. Years from now they will still be sitting in those offices. I suspect that most of them have bigger cars and houses than I do, but I don’t mind. I am one of the 0.5 percent who is already rich.