Why Write?

Writers are wordy people. We can't give a simple answer without elaborating on the subject, offering an unwanted explanation, or recanting an associated anecdote. So, to save everyone I know from my boring dialogues, I decided to bore people I don't know, by writing.

I have been writing since childhood, and I have a filing cabinet full of unpublished, half written articles and novels to prove it. But about two years ago, I decided to take up the cause seriously. Let's be honest here, I decided for financial reasons, and I have to admit that I have felt some embarrassment at that, especially when I read some other writers' bios. Apparently, there are many of us out there who are noble beyond all belief and write solely for the purpose of helping others, saving the world, and aiding mankind. Their dedicated responses sort of remind me of the answers those other girls gave when several of us ran for homecoming queen "way back when", and I didn't win.

Fast forward a few decades. I do enjoy writing, I have to admit. The truth is that none of us would be doing it if we didn't love it, because, as we have all discovered, it certainly isn't to make a fast buck. So here's to all of us that write, for whatever reason.

Sticking With It

I am always amused when I encounter someone who comments that they have been writing for several weeks, and have made no money, and I imagine that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Samuel Clemens, and Hemingway would get a chuckle out of that as well. Well, Clemens would anyway.

We are, unfortunately, an instant gratification society. We expect a return on our work immediately, which is a bad mindset for a writer. Granted, all of us would love to see some cash flow, but if it's a steady paycheck you're looking for, you really need to get a nine to five job. In my case, that's not possible, since I am needed at home, so I started researching the net for all those fabulous opportunities that are purported to give you a steady and substantial income virtually overnight.

Bear in mind that there are, after all, some seven billion people in the world, and a lot of them write. Are any of us going to achieve fame and fortune, probably not. But, there are ways to make a little extra cash. It takes time, patience, and the reality that the success stories that you read about are rare.

Many article writing websites pay by the page view. That is, you may get a couple of pennies per 1,000 views if you're lucky. I have yet to calculate how many articles you would need to make a living with this. Of course, some sites actually pay an upfront payment. These sites advertise that the payments for articles will be anywhere from $2.00 to $20.00, which means that they will offer you around $2.50. Anyone who has submitted an article that took several hours to compose, had it returned twice for rewrites, and was then  offered $2.00, knows the pain, not to mention the feeling of absolute foolishness involved. However, it is true that if you have 3 or 4,000 articles up and running, you might make a couple of hundred a month in revenue, if you're lucky, and this is what keeps all of us up and running.

Eventually, someone will ask you that question that you really don't want to consider. For me, it came several months after I had begun writing when I proudly announced that I had made $15.00. My husband looked at me hunched over the keyboard, eyes narrowed in a permanent squint, and asked, "How much are you making an hour doing that?"

"Well," I explained to him, knowing full well that I could be doing better at the local burger barn. "That's not the point." But it really is. Writing is a job, regardless of what others may think, and articles that take hours to research and write, and never realize more than a few cents in revenue are just plain bad business. I can say this honestly because I made that mistake, and now have thousands of hours, in thousands of articles that don't make zip. No social networking, or tweeking will fix this. Find a niche that people are interested in and stick to it - period. Which poses another problem. What to write about.

                     

ONLINE WRITING SITES

Writing sites abound on the worldwide web, because they need material in which to display the ads that make them money. While they insist that they are interested in quality, and some actually may be, they are, for the most part looking for cheap labor to fill in the blanks between ads. This is where the online writer comes in.

With the economy in shambles, and more and more people looking to supplement their income, people will and do choose willingly to lose all sense of reason and self respect, and prostitute their writing for pennies, literally. While some sites claim to pay up to $10 or even $50 for an article, the sad reality is that most pay $1 or $2, and the revenue promised for the article may result in less than a dollar a year.

Of course this does not hold true for those that are experts in fields such as video games, electronics, and "Dancing With the Stars." In fact, there are thousands of professionals in technical fields writing outstanding articles online, which begs the question, "If they have a doctorate in this field, why are they dinking around with an online article website that pays a buck an article?"