The Amateurization of Everything: Part 2

More thoughts on what happens when a career becomes a hobby.

Fernand Siméon’s “La lette surprise” via Artvee.

Shortly after I started writing full-time in the late 1990s, I attended a freelance journalists’ networking party and mentioned to another writer that the market looked pretty good to me; there was a lot of work.

“Yeah,” he said. “But pay rates have been stuck at a dollar a word since the eighties.”

For those unfamiliar with current rates, $1 a word would thrill most established writers today—in real dollars, not adjusted for inflation. It’s also true that that writer’s opinion was commonplace—the $1-a-word standard was considered outdated back then.

Early last year, I wrote about how the erosion of writer pay turned my journalism career into a hobby, and I shared my concerns that I’m now helping to amateurize the jobs of other professionals, like graphic designers and podcasters, through this newsletter.

It became my most popular post ever; more than a year later it gets reposted a few times a week. Many readers were blown away by the 2000-era pay rates; the range for commercial magazines was between $1 and $2 a word. Many expressed shock that I could get $4,000 for a 2,000-word story when the rent on my Brooklyn one-bedroom was $950 a month. Today writers are nostalgic for the $400 payments they got in the 2010s.

I wasn’t a name writer, either—this was just what the Hearst and Conde Nast magazines paid, and I was genuinely surprised to learn how many writers didn’t know that.

The response made me realize how important it is to keep these memories. People need to know just how much money has been siphoned from writers’ bank accounts over the past few decades.

Still, I understand why writers like me sometimes get called out for complaining about pay. No one asked you to be a writer; go do something else if you’re unhappy.

Leigh Stein, creator of the very smart and useful Attention Economy newsletter, made the excellent point that “the good old days” had major problems. The traditional gatekeeping system of publishing has largely excluded writers of color. On the flip side, the platform economy has opened up opportunities for people who didn’t go to the “right schools” or know the “right people.”

This is an important point. And if the transfer of wealth had simply moved from white writers to writers of color, from male writers to female ones, straight to LGBTQ+, Ivy league to state school grads—well, then hooray! Instead, most of the money has flowed upward to the tech giants that profit from writers’ work without paying for it.

Stein also expressed impatience with the entitlement of disgruntled writers:

Where did anyone get the idea that it’s easy to make income from creating art? Or even that you deserve to make money from art? Name ONE period in history when it was easy to make income for creative writing.

Well, screenwriters have done all right. It’s become a lot tougher in recent years, but unlike most print writers, screenwriters have a union that enables members to earn healthy middle-class incomes, and it works to protect members from the land grabs that invariably occur when platforms and technology change. When screenwriters go on strike, as they did last year, the general sentiment is not that they’re whiney babies who need to buck up—they’re treated like professionals entitled to their livelihoods. It’s understood that the money is there; the question is how it’s divided between various parties.

Stein didn’t call out my piece in particular—the point about writer pay has been made countless times by my fellow old cranks, so I have no reason to believe she even read it. Regardless, I’m not going to apologize for “waxing nostalgic about the good old days,” as she put it.

It’s important to remember. It’s important for people to know that low writer pay isn’t an immutable law of nature; you can pass laws that force companies like Google and Meta to pay.

But I also have a confession: In the year since publishing that piece, I’ve realized that I’m enjoying my writing life more than I have for a long time.

I also didn’t tell the full story of what it was like to be a working writer in the late 1990s and early 2000s—or, at least, what it was like to write for women’s magazines, which is how I primarily earned my living.

Before I get into this, I want to say that I worked with many terrific editors, some of whom became good friends. A few of the women’s magazines I wrote for had clear and straightforward editorial processes. But in general, the process with the big Hearst and Conde Nast women’s and teen magazines was usually torturous for both writers and editors.

In the last piece, I mentioned that a $2-a-word story required several rewrites, which on its face sounds more than fair. I didn’t say that the revision process at big women’s magazines frequently extended over several months, and sometimes lasted close to a year. It was typical to write four or five drafts, though it could be more.

Sometimes the revision requests were good calls that made the piece stronger. More often, your job was to rip apart the prose you’d painstakingly crafted so that you could wedge in many different editors’ ideas, even if they made no sense to you. The editorial direction often changed wildly with each revision. I was frequently instructed to remove passages that were written only to appease a different editor on an earlier draft.

When the piece came out, it often bore very little resemblance to the original draft—and sometimes it didn’t share much in common with the third or fourth drafts. For many years, a quote meme with my name would pop up on Google search: “Repeat this mantra to yourself: I rule, I rule, I rule.” I didn’t write that line, I would never write that line. But I may well have signed off on the women’s magazine piece it was plucked from. The revision process was so exhausting and dispiriting that in the final weeks all you wanted was for them to let you go and cut the check.

Still, writing for women’s magazines was a job. I got the money; I put up with the crap. I developed many skills that have served me well—how to gather information, how to interview, how to write in the voice of a powerful institution, how to process multiple and conflicting opinions and produce a document everyone will sign off on.

But it’s only now dawning on me just how much my obedience cost me. I was so focused on following instructions that I often lost my bearings—my sense of what was interesting, what was important, what was worth writing about. I was perpetually in a state of asking permission—my hard drive is a graveyard of ideas and inspirations that never made it past editors’ inboxes.

True story: The most popular and career-defining piece I’ve ever written is composed almost entirely of copy that was cut from a women’s magazine piece I’d published a few years earlier. The piece became one of the most popular Modern Love essays in the history of the column. A few years later, I defied gravity by publishing a second Modern Love. This is an essay I rewrote twice for a women’s magazine editor before she decided to pass.

Today, my writing life is completely bifurcated. I earn my living by writing and editing unbylined copy for a variety of organizations and individuals. And then I write this newsletter. My readership has picked up considerably since last year, but financially speaking this is still a hobby.

The thing about hobbies, though: They’re fun. You get to experiment, explore the topics that interest you the most, and talk to other people with the same interests. And if you aren’t enjoying it, you can stop.

I’m enjoying it—a lot.

I’m no longer writing to please editors, who are often shaping the copy to please advertisers. I’m writing to please readers. I’m writing in the hope that I can provide something of value, a note in your inbox that might make dealing with this god-awful world a little easier.

And when I fail, that’s OK. Because it’s my failure. Now, if I write something clunky or boring or just plain bad … it’s all my fault. And that’s great!

When we were kids, we ended school papers with a paragraph that began “In conclusion.”

In conclusion, there has never been a good time to be a writer. No.

In conclusion, Substack is a wonderful platform. Thank you, Substack, and your billionaire owners! No.

Expectations change. The ground shifts underneath us. It happens gradually and then all at once. We have to adjust, adapt, retrack.

But we also have to remember.

It’s important to remember that a person with a high-school education could once earn enough money to buy a house, take vacations, and send their kids to college. It’s important to remember childhood summers spent almost entirely outside, free from worries about wildfire smoke or dangerous heat.

We need to remember. Who knows what luxuries we’ll be regaling future generations with? Free speech? Social Security? Fire departments? Table service?

No, I’m serious. A person used to come to your table and ask what you wanted to eat. No, you didn’t have to stand in line; you didn’t need to download an app. You just talked to a person and they brought the food to you. And then they’d come back and refill your water glass. Yeah, they brought you water—for free.

It’s important to remember, and then it’s important to put those memories aside and look out the window at the morning sun. It’s important to sit down at your desk and say, OK are we doing this? and call up your most recent draft—v8, v9, v10, v11—and rewrite and revise until you finally offer this.