Ready or not

Writing for free about writing for free

It's fine to write for free.

Everybody who writes, writes for free. Some also get paid, most do not. Most aren’t even trying to. Most are writing secret poems or epic Facebook posts, not pitching to Hot Takes Weekly in the hopes of getting $150 in six months.

But the way the field of published writing is structured, virtually all work is in some sense on spec. That is, you do the work, and then find out if anyone even wants to pay for it. This is true even at places where you must get a pitch accepted before writing the article. Clearly you have to write the pitch first, and to do so you need to have more or less planned the article. There’s no entity that sits in your computer and is like, I see you opened a blank document, here’s some money to entice you to turn that into something.

And then there’s how, to even break into professional writing at all, you need to spend time writing, whether in Word docs or notebooks or (ahem) on blogs, all before you have even the prospect of getting readers, paying or otherwise. Even established professional writers are promoting their work on social media via writing-for-free. It is, as I think I’ve droned on about for long enough here, unavoidable.

(And: many/most of the “paid” writing gigs pay so little as to be a kind of ceremonial fee, announcing that the recipient is a paid writer, but not meaningfully changing who can afford to be a writer.)

But should you write for free? As in should you do so for publications?

BDM, above, is addressing the question, prompted by drama (that I may have contributed to) surrounding a NYT story about a new publication for the hip and downtown (“downtown” as in a part of Manhattan a young person needs family money or a finance job to live anywhere near) that is not paying its writers. The article showcases the women behind this publication, mentioning their high-end attire, yes, but also photographing them in what looks like an upscale bar, in again this hyper-chic area, which they are scrappily using as their start-up ‘office.’

No, it’s not clear if the founders are being paid by some entity, yet, for their work, and the implication is certainly that they are not. Also implied: that these are people with independent sources of wealth (family money or other jobs or both), or else how exactly are they doing what they’re doing, where they’re doing it, and in the style they’re doing it in?

But this seems less an ethical concern, and more like, here are some rich people having fun together. It’s not quite the same as contributing free content to a publication whose cause you believe in, but more like, paying (with your time and typing) to play (be part of a clique, even if you’re a remote unpaid freelancer who never meets these women/never goes to whatever Dimes Square is*.) Anyone looking to write professionally is probably sending their pitches elsewhere.

What concerns me more is the way that the ease of writing for free can make it seem insurmountable and possibly not worth the effort to write for pay. And because people will want you to write for free, it’s in their interests to make you feel like someone who is not ready for the big-leagues, big-leagues defined as being paid $200 for 800 words. There’s paying your dues, and then there’s overpaying them tenfold.

*I do know what it is, but it wasn’t called this circa 2007 when I was a young person out in the evenings in the general vicinity.