What I Hate About Writing
The good, the bad, and the ugly.
Since I was in middle school, I always had an interest in writing, but to be honest with you all, the only reason I decided to pursue this craft as a vocation was because I wanted to make money.
Sort of.
See, if you just want to print dollar bills, there are easier career paths than that of a writer, artist, or content creator.
However, if you want a job where you can make your own hours, earn a good income, and have creative freedom in your daily life, writing or content creation might just be the perfect job for you.
Writing is one the best careers in the world today for living with as much freedom, autonomy, and control.
But in the trade for more freedom and for the ability for more people to have more freedom, we’ve lost some things in writing. Writing today is not what writing was 25 or 50 years ago.
Compared to the world that all-time greats like Hemingway or Dickens were working in, writing as a vocation is completely different today.
Here’s what I love and what I hate.
What I hate about old writing is what I love about new writing.
In the old days, to become a writer, you’d have to write a story or essay, submit it to a publication or a publishing house (by mail), and wait for months on end until you heard back if your story was good enough to be published according to the publisher.
That, or you had to get a job as a journalist, meaning you had to sit in an office for hours on end, slamming coffee, smoking cigarettes (or inhaling secondhand smoke), and getting your story done by the end of the day.
Becoming a writer used to be much harder than it is now.
It used to be this exclusive vocation held by hermits and rejects, and now it’s trendy.
Instead of hiding in an office using nicotine to get ideas out of their head and onto a piece of paper via typewriter, writers today are productivity bros and ladies who call themselves “content creators”. The bar is lower than it’s ever been if you want to make a living with content.
Now, everyone who has access to the internet can become a writer.
That’s amazing because there are a lot of people who didn’t have the chance to write years ago who will now be able to become writers, publish books, and get the benefits of writing, like:
mental clarity
a possible new business
decreased anxiety
And more.
However, there’s also a downside to lowering the accessibility for everyone becoming a writer.
What I hate about new writing.
There’s something hypocritical about me telling you what I hate about the new writing world that I obsessively follow and study and adapt to, but if I can’t criticize myself, who can I criticize?
The problem with writing today is the same thing that is the beauty of writing today.
Writing today is possible for so many people because it’s so much easier for people to become entrepreneurs through writing. Monetizing writing is easier than ever.
Fiction writing is still pretty much as difficult as it was. Very few fiction authors have successful books through self-publishing. It’s not just a grind, it’s something that most people can’t do because they don’t know how to promote their work.
In order to promote your work you need to learn the skill of “copywriting”.
Copywriting is a high-income skill in today’s writing world and it’s not a new skill, but because of the structure of the writing world today, most people are self-promoting their work through their content.
Even ghostwriting (a dolled-up form of copywriting) is the way that I make most of my income in writing. Articles like this one or even articles from my other newsletter, The Grappler’s Diary, make me between $0-$300 tops.
The way you make money as a writer is by writing for business.
The problem with that is that we’ve death of stories in exchange for business ideas.
Everyone is writing to sell you their product or service, no one is writing to tell stories.
Even the stories that they are telling end up being sales pitches in disguise.
The solution is to be less pretentious.
Both extremes of the writing world are a bit pretentious and exclusive.
You can either be a writer who is an artist or a writer who is a salesman. You can either be a successful entrepreneur or a starving artist.
Those are the options that many writers face every day.
But what about you?
For me, what I’m trying to do is find where writing fits into my life. The value of literature for me — both creating and consuming.
How do I produce work that is a commercial success without being a sleazebag selling another Gumroad course on how to write viral tweets?
I’ll be writing an ebook on how to write in the modern world soon, and it’s a deeply terrifying undertaking because I don’t want to end up like the people I can’t stand.
That’s why I am trying it. I want to understand it.
What I’ve found is that the way to find truth is to embrace what you are not already doing.
Challenging yourself to write in new ways. Creating new stories for the sake of creation. Testing and learning from the result. Making people pay for your work not because they need it, but because they love it.
Maybe I’m just a dreamer and an idealist, but I like to think that this can work. This idea is what keeps my passion projects alive.
Closing Thoughts
The solution to what I hate about writing is realizing that I don’t really hate anything about writing.
I hate doing the same things over and over again.
I hate only writing newsletters. I hate only writing personal essays. I hate only writing about Jiu-Jitsu. I hate only writing non-fiction. I hate only writing for businesses or entrepreneurs.
I love writing, but I hate when writing becomes stale due to a lack of variety in the content with which I can write about.
I don’t hate writing, I hate when the systems that we write in limit the pursuit of the craft.
These systems are important, but it’s also important to break free from them so you can realize how little you need them. So that you can learn to be adaptable.
That’s what makes someone a “modern writer”.
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