The last piece of writing I filed and got paid for was in September of 2023, the same month as my cancer diagnosis. I think I made $100 for it.
Things had been shrinking in terms of payments for a while before I got sick. The magazine where I did a lot of writing used to have me on an annual retainer where I got a flat fee every year to be a contributing writer on the masthead plus two guaranteed features a year plus frequent requests to write things on deadlines. Then they cut my retainer, then cut me from two to one features a year, then no features. Then they stopped asking for short pieces. The message boiled down to: thanks for winning us a bunch of awards, but you are now too expensive. When I glance at an issue lately, most of their contributing writers are not professional journalists but stay at home moms, academics publishing stuff related to their research, or interns.
A few years back I had a retainer from a different magazine, which at the time had a grant from a large private university. Because I had a particular expertise, they also paid me a flat fee every year to write 8-9 articles. Those often got read by people from universities, which would in turn lead to the occasional invitations to speak, which in turn led to some extra money. The Covid happened, and the last time I got one of those invitations was in 2022. I’ve done lots of Zoom talks, but, reasonably, you don’t get paid as much (if anything) for those. The magazine lost the grant money, and they stopped asking for me to work for them and started relying on people who’d write for no fee at all. Academics, interns, grad students, etc.
The other place I regularly freelanced got in touch earlier this year about pitches and then never followed up when I sent those pitches in. I had a column for a year at another magazine, but when I finished cancer treatment the subject matter I’d been writing about no longer held interest, so I gave it up. Now the odds are that will never happen again. There are a million stories like this from writers. It’s why so many people charge for their newsletters, but I do not write regularly enough here to justify that.
But it is strange every day to go from being booked and busy and seeing my byline pop up regularly to just being another person clouding your inbox with newsletter content. Yet the idea of trying to pitch again, to establish new connections at new publications only to eventually see those also shrivel up, or to watch editors I like getting laid off, it all just seems demoralizing and exhausting, and a lot of my friends who also freelance have said similar. They’ve left writing for steadier gigs, and who could blame them? And honestly, I could only afford to be a freelancer at the rates I was making because I already had a full time job. I was heading for burnout trying to do both at once. Maybe cancer was just the stop sign that was coming all along.
But it is nonetheless a new kind of life to go from writing all the time, winning awards for my writing, getting book deals and giving paid talks to, apparently, nothing. Do I have things I want to write about? Of course. Do I still know editors who like working with me? Yes (I think). But the odds of building up the kind of career I used to have all over again are just too daunting to think about.
So like everything else, this is a new era for me as a writer. The takes are slower. The pay rate is zero. The end goal is not books or bylines, but something more abstract: writing without deadlines, without an idea of an audience, without the idea of “writer” being linked to publication.
But that’s where I started. That’s where we all start. You don’t get a leg up the ladder just because you’ve climbed it before. You go back down into the mess, time and time again, and you see what happens when you emerge, and you find out if anyone still cares what you have to say. Nobody survives as a writer unless they also survive knowing what it’s like when nobody cares if you write or not. The real test is what James Baldwin said: not talent or luck, but endurance.
Oh to be on the other side of this conversation.