3 Damaging Myths That Keep Writers Poor And Undervalued
By: Daniel Rosehill
Tags: Careers, Careers Advice, Writing, Freelance Writing, Freelance Writing Career

“Anybody can write.”

The first way we can take a pop at this is to point out that actually no not “everybody” can write. There are people in the world, for instance, who are neither literate nor capable of typing on a computer–and the latter is really the main prerequisite for a career as a “writer” in today’s world.

But that’s typically not what the naysayers are trying to allege.

They mean that because anybody they can readily conceive of can type at a computer, it means that writing is a complete non-skill.

By that token, writing is like respiring air. Just as you wouldn’t expect to be paid for the service of walking into an office and breathing air, it’s absurd to think that a business is going to pay you to “just write.”

The rebuttal:

The gulf between writing for fun and writing professionally is actually rather large. Anybody who makes a living from writing knows that. And knows that there are few things about this career that could be considered ‘easy’.

Do you know how to use a video camera? Do you know how to drive a car? Do you know how to take a photograph? Have you built IKEA furniture before?

Assuming you answered yes to at least one of those now try to answer this:

Do you regard yourself a videographer — such that if a local cinema production company were looking for a fill-in you’d think about applying?

If somebody rocked up to your door in a rally car — would you know what to do in order to take it out on a circuit?

Do you think that knowing how to put together the odd piece of IKEA furniture qualifies you to begin marketing yourself as an interior designer and professional mechanic?

If you did answer yes to any of those things, you’d likely find yourself getting horribly out of your depth in very short order being asked to do things you didn’t have the first clue how to pull off. Annoyed clients. Annoyed you. Misery all round.

And you know what?

This is kind of what’s happening in freelance writing.

The lack of barriers to entry — and not the odd YouTube huckster who tells you that you can absolutely get very rich if you get into freelance writing and buy my course — further the notion that anybody can write. And many people who are unable to write — even to normative standards of grammar — enter the market. “Freelance writers” who can’t string together a grammatically correct sentence abound. As do “cybersecurity experts” who couldn’t tell you the difference between, say, a VPN and a proxy if their life depended on it.

The result? Clients assume that freelance writing is a skill-less craft filled with those changing their arms at it and that the next prospective writer who sends them a resume is a charlatan. The next step: bad pay for everyone.

Freelance writing, by the way, requires knowing how to do a lot more than “just write” — even if that were easy. You’ll also need to know:

How to run a business. There’s a lot to this and freelance writers are typically one man or woman shops who have to do everything from keeping books to filing tax reports.

How to market yourself to find work. Or network in order to hear about it that way.

How to keep on top of written deliverables for potentially as many as 8 clients at the one time. Deadline juggling becomes an art form.

“Writing is easy “

A corollary to the notion that anybody can write is the idea that writing to professional standards on complicated topics is somehow easy.

You know how easy such writing isn’t (at least for me)?

So un-easy that whenever I sit down to write for clients I have to make sure that my room is perfectly silent, that I’ve drunk my coffee, and that I’m going to be focusing on absolutely nothing but the draft for the next X minutes. It takes every once of concentration that I can muster.

I put such a premium on the value of deep work, in fact, that I put my phone into flight mode whenever I’m doing something like this:

The problem?

I’ve got the impression that many freelance clients have thought that writing their blogs is something I could do while a little tipsy and typing into my phone while taking a touristy horse and cart ride in some busy Spanish holiday resort with screaming teenagers trying to sell me churros from the roadside. Perhaps I’d have the odd conversation going on too. “Si señor, déjame terminar el blog y estoy contigo”.

The reason I say this?

Their budgets often made zero sense unless writing is a near zero effort enterprise.

I recently encountered a client whose maximum budget for a blog post was $300 (and even getting there was a strain) — including an outline that needed approval. When it came to leveraging their one revision they went all out. Multiple stakeholders needed to leave their two cents in excruciating detail.

The question that went through my head — and if you’ve been in this industry, you’ve probably had this thought too — “does this person really think it’s worth my time to go through all this hassle for $300?”

There are a couple of possibilities that lead to answering that question in the affirmative:

No but the client doesn’t really care and will try extract maximum value from whoever they work with (of these in the writing space there are plenty; the best solution is typically not to worth with them).

The client thinks that this process is really easy and that actioning their massively detailed feedback could take you all of five minutes.

Neither of those options is entirely benign. Again: the only real option, in my experience, is avoidance. The problem: when such clients comprise a significant chunk of the buying-side of the industry. Perhaps even the majority of it.