Wordmongering

I'll ask the question you're not asking: why do you, and by extension, should I, be bothering with freelance writing, if it takes the form of dreadful, soul-crushing wordmongering. Don't your words have value? Aren't you worth more than this?

Well, of course I am. The thing is, I really, really, really love writing. More than anything in the world, I want to work as a writer. I would write technical manuals if I had to (actually, that would pay better, I should look into that.)

A lot of people do the freelance writing thing because they want to work from home, want to be able to call themselves 'a writer', or just have a lot to say on a specific, marketable topic. Not me. I just want to write, and I find increasingly that doing jobs that don't involve writing make me desperately unhappy.

So yeah, I get tired of churning out reviews of milling machines and fungus cream, or ghostwriting tedious articles on social media or business, but I'd rather my words be out there, and seen, and sold, than to go to a job and get a regular paycheck, even though it would pay better and be less work.

Tremendous American novelist Joyce Carol Oates (@JoyceCarolOates) just tweeted her top 10 writing tips, and I thought I'd share them with you here:

1) Write your heart out.

2) The first sentence can be written only after the last sentence has been written. FIRST DRAFTS ARE HELL. FINAL DRAFTS, PARADISE.

3) You are writing for your contemporaries--not for Posterity. If you are lucky, your contemporaries will become Posterity.

4) Keep in mind Oscar Wilde: "A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal."

5) When in doubt how to end a chapter, bring in a man with a gun. (This is Raymond Chandler's advice, not mine. I would not try this.)

6) Unless you are experimenting with form--gnarled, snarled & obscure--be alert for possibilities of paragraphing.

7) Be your own editor/ critic. Sympathetic but merciless!

8) Don't try to anticipate an ideal reader--or any reader. He/ she might exist--but is reading someone else.

9) Read, observe, listen intensely!--as if your life depended upon it.

10) Write your heart out.

I've noticed a really extensive trend of people wanting to give me writing advice. Obviously, since I'm writing a blog that claims to do exactly that, I'm a part of the problem (if it is a problem).

Clearly, getting advice from unknown, unpublished authors is a tenuous proposition at best. Why should you listen to some random internet shmuck when their own writing ability isn't enough to make them successful?

There are a number of reasons, though first there is a great point to be made here: there is an overabundance of EVERYTHING on the internet, so you have to be selective anyway. Sample broadly, and find the blogs/sites that appeal to you. Don't create an echo chamber for yourself, but try to find information that excites and inspires you.

Don't write off blogs by unpublished or struggling writers (like mine) just because they're not big names (though feel free to find other reasons to). Some writers aren't after success - and more power to them. Many have trouble breaking in, but may still be very talented and insightful. And hey, it may be the lady on MySpace with seventeen unpublished Twilight otherkin fanfic novels who really speaks to you.

As always, in your wordmongering endeavors, there are options. If you are seriously hurting for cash and have a truly prolific writing ability, you may want to look into PPI (pay-per-impression) or PPC (pay-per-click) sites, like Suite101, examiner.com, Ezine Articles or Hubpages.

As I'm sure you can tell, this business model is going to fuck you in the ass if you're not really good at what you do. You get paid a pittance - something like a $.01/1000 impressions or something like that, and the parent site gets to take the better part of it. Still, certain sites come with a framework and tools to make your articles look more professional and have an existing readership, so this may work for you, especially if you have a niche, like butt fungus or dog medication.

The ability to produce as much written material as possible is not really a hallmark of great writers, or so we are lead to believe. Every word should be agonized over, every sentence a masterpiece, every novel a beautifully crafted tapestry without a single unnecessary thread. If you spend a lifetime working on a single novel, that's a lifetime well spent.

I don't want to seem contrary, but that's horseshit. Most writers know this, but writing is still imbued with some sort of mystical essence (see Fuck Your Writer's Block) that prevents people from understanding that being a good writer is dependent on the same elements that being a good pianist, golfer or woodworker are dependent on - hard work and lots of practice. The 10,000 hour rule popularized by Malcom Gladwell in Outliers applies to you too buddy, so you'd better be writing every time you sit down at that coffee shop in full view of everyone, and not just 'researching'.

Here's the relevant bit, if you're getting bored: don't obsess over getting it right the first time. Work on flow, process, speed. Don't write gibberish, but feel free to leave a shitty sentence or even chapter in there if it means finishing the piece. Plenty of good writers have managed to produce excellent writing while being unusually prolific - Isaac Aasimov, Alexandre Dumas and Nora Roberts among them.

The other side of the wordmongering coin, in contrast to content mill, are websites that put you directly in contact with the client. These are places like Freelancer.com, Odesk, and Elance. You bid on a job, if the client likes what they see, you work for them and get paid. Sounds simple, right?

Well...in theory, it should be, but in practice it rarely is. You have to compete with Bangladeshi PhDs or stay-at-home moms who want the work more than the pay and are thrilled to undercut you on every bid. You have to work hard to make yourself visible, apply to tons of jobs, and even then there is a very high chance you may end up not getting paid at all. You might also end up doing something you find unsavory, like writing term papers or copying content, if the job isn't clearly defined.

Not to mention, most jobs that are posted pay less than a penny a word, if that, and often require tremendous amounts of work. The clients also frequently think that you are their bitch-slave, and can be asked to work around the clock and be available to chat at every possible moment. There are the occasional gems, but the pros who frequent these sites will snap them up as soon as they appear, so you either have to have a very strong portfolio or be willing to shell out real money to improve your visibility (something all of these sites offer).

It's awfully common on the internet to try to score points in a forum or social media conversation by pointing out grammatical errors or equally insignificant mistakes, especially when you want to discredit or humiliate your opponent. I liked Marcus Aurelius' approach to this:

"I've always said there are – to oversimplify it – two kinds of writers. There are architects and gardeners. The architects do blueprints before they drive the first nail, they design the entire house, where the pipes are running, and how many rooms there are going to be, how high the roof will be. But the gardeners just dig a hole and plant the seed and see what comes up. I think all writers are partly architects and partly gardeners, but they tend to one side or another, and I am definitely more of a gardener. In my Hollywood years when everything does work on outlines, I had to put on my architect's clothes and pretend to be an architect. But my natural inclinations, the way I work, is to give my characters the head and to follow them."

Here's the fundamental core of the wordmongering lifestyle: the content mill. These are glorious, exploitative places where you can churn out SEO optimized crap and be paid a pittance for it. If you've ever wanted to feverishly write for hours about dog sweaters or different types of mangoes, this is the work for you.

There are a lot of content farms out there, with varying payment options and reliability. The foremost, perhaps, is DemandMedia, which churns out those terribly unhelpful eHow articles, among other things, and pays its writers fairly well - $15 - $30 an article, but don't expect to get paid frequently or even consistently unless you're very lucky or very good. Their content generation plan is very specific - there are not always articles available and their editors are more anal than my professors ever were. I was hired and told that my articles weren't up to their quality standards, twice. Still, if you can find a niche and don't mind bending over backwards to meet bizarre editing demands, you can make a good bit of cash working for Demand.

Textbroker, as you might be able to tell, was part of the inspiration for this blog. There's no bones about this one - textbroker pays by the word, and bases your pay rate on the quality of your grammar and writing. Very meritocratic. It's unglamorous, and you need to write a lot about very boring stuff, but the transparency is nice and there is almost always something to write about.

The star system determines which jobs you have access to, and how much you get paid. Most writers start at 3 Stars and earn a pitiful $.01 a word, 4 Star writers earn a still pitiful (but comparable with other content mills) $.015 a word, and 5 Star writers earn an enviable $.05 a word, which is insulting to a career writer, but almost luxurious for a freelancer.

Constant Content has a slightly different business model, in that it allows you to place articles you've written on their website for potential buyers to review and purchase. If you're a prolific writer in your very specific area of interest, this might just be what you need - you put your article on the website, and if someone likes it, you get paid.

Unfortunately, there is no guarantee of payment, and since you've probably turned to wordmongering to pay the bills, it can be a bit stressful to try to make rent with Constant Content. Still, if you have a little breathing room and want to write about something you like for a change, this is a very good option.

Scripted is the creme-de-la-creme of content mills. They have a shinier logo, a more communicative editorial staff, a better payment model and a lot more transparency. Unfortunately, they still don't pay all that well, but it's the best you're likely to find at somewhere between $25 and $40 for a 500 word article. There are also very few articles available to bid on, and you have to apply to each distinct specialty with a writing sample to have access to jobs in that area. The barrier to entry is fairly high and the payoff is a little low, but Scripted makes you feel a little less terrible about yourself at the end of the day.

I was thinking this morning, while I was slaughtering an undead foe in one of the many games that allows you to do so, how viscerally satisfying and even righteous it feels to destroy zombies and other risen dead. It occurred to me then, as it has before, that there is probably something to that - something fundamentally hardwired into our minds that inspires the gut-level loathing and terror that humans feel regarding zombies.

On the other hand, zombies are so overdone that I can barely stand to see movies about them anymore, much less engage in a conversation on the topic. The popularity of zombie media has divorced the concept from the powerful roots it has in deep cultural and psychological phobias and made it banal and safe.

Above: The Twilightification of Zombies

There are no shortage of words spilled furiously from frothing mouths about the diluting of zombie media, but that's not what I'm trying to express here, or at least not exactly.

This wired article points out the ways that zombie movies reflect the fears of a generation. Zombies can easily placed in a contemporary framework to become a metaphor/cathartic vehicle for communism, nuclear holocaust, global pandemics, terrorism, etc - whatever the current bugaboo might be. Romero's zombies reveal the dark, dystopian hopelessness of the Cold War generation. The terrifying, urban, fast zombies from 28 Days Later revitalize the foe and make them relevant and newly horrible in a post-9/11 world. The Walking Dead reveals, if nothing else, how passé zombies are by ignoring them completely in favor of incredibly bland character conflicts.

Above: Desperate Housewives with zombie extras.

The wired article, however, is a victim of its pop-culture roots, and fails to go far enough. Yes, zombies reflect the conscious fears of a generation, but they also reflect our dark, hidden terrors, and this is the ugly side of zombie media that goes unexamined.

Relative unknown Kyle Bishop argued in his dissertation that the zombie as foe was born out of the poorly remembered 1932 film White Zombie, as you might guess by the title, was a cinematic monstrosity born of imperialism, racism and xenophobia. Building on the real-life roots of the Haitain vodou zombie, White Zombie pins on the constructed Other of the Haitain witch doctor all of the west's fears about race, miscegenation, popular uprisings, paganism and witchcraft. America has never shaken its fear of the slave uprising, even well after the end of slavery. As Bishop says, "“The zombie is, essentially, a colonial creation where the greatest fear is of a monster, a slavelike creature, and that those who had been enslaved would rise up and impose power on us."

Above: "The real crime here isn't that they're going to eat our brains, it's that they're doing it while black."

The racist tendencies of zombie media have been well documented, and while I do love to attribute sub-conscious imperialist notions wherever I can, I think that Bishop's dissertation is also missing the point.

Zombies may have their roots in racist Otherizing of Haitain religious traditions, but the undead have persisted through the ostensible end of imperialism, through the Cold War into a post 9/11 America. There is something even more pervasive than culturally embedded racism and xenophobia at work here.

I believe the zombie is a psychologically grounded ur-Other, the Platonic ideal of 'that-which-is-not-us' [in this case 'us' being the nebulous zeitgeist of 'the West' or 'America']. Zombies embody all of our fears, from benign to horrible, and that embodiment allows a unique and bloody catharsis in the form of zombie-slaying, which is singularly and consistently violent. Yes, World War Z is a thinly veiled lament of America's loss of world prestige, but it also expresses a fear of Otherized bodies: those of the diseased, the mentally ill, the alien. It is the inheritor of a terrible modernity we have been struggling with for a century:

This is the persistent root of the zombie image, that which makes them so terrifyingly real while being so preposterously fantastic. Their hunger reflects the unfed underclass in America and abroad; their rotting flesh and exposed organs symbolize the frailty of diseased bodies; their blind hatred and mindless ferocity embodies the true violence inherent in human beings. And to underscore these atrocious qualities, zombie media insists upon us that these traits are present in all of us: we can all become zombies, and with appalling ease. The zombie is both Other, and it is us - we fear our instincts to violence, the traitorous cells in our own bodies, the Eichmann in our souls. Zombies are the all-fear, modifiable to the viewer, the walking external self that our cultural mind needed to express its fear of the modern world, full of bodily terror and the constant promise of physical or psychological frailty.

Hence the recent trend toward 'safe' zombies, romantic zombies, funny zombies. Not only is this a natural, if unfortunate, consequence of excessive popularity, it is the historical trend of cultural ideas that proved dangerous to society. Pirates, gangsters, cowboys, Halloween, all sterilized and made safe by a cultural obsession with and fear of the criminal, of the Other, of that which cannot be properly absorbed and incorporated into society.

Even still, these newer works reflect something about the deeply rooted cultural fears of our modern society. Warm Bodies is probably as much a  reflection of a cultural fascination with and revulsion of necrophilia; The Walking Dead, personally, makes me ask more questions about an aging and decaying American South, the breakdown of the nuclear family and the effects of infidelity than it does about zombies; hell, I am not entirely sure that Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was not meant to be a devilishly clever statement about the death of literature and twisted future of the English language.

Above: Undeath of the Author

In any case, the zombie seems to be a persistent cultural icon, but a troubling one. The fact that it remains a vehicle for our racism, misogyny, violent tendencies, fear of the unknown, xenophobia, mortality and collective hypochondria suggests that we, as a society, are not appropriately addressing these issues. Thus, for many people, the act of slaying a zombie or watching a zombie be slain is powerfully fulfilling - like the dragon of the Middle Ages, which represented dangerous nature, black magics, the devil and more, the zombie is an embodied punching bag to work out our aggression and fear upon.

You never hear about a carpenter having 'carpenter's block', or a doctor having 'doctor's block'. That would be ridiculous. For some reason, however, every writer in the world feels justified in complaining about their writer's block.

This phrase needs to die.

It's an elaborate justification for not working and it's specific to writers. That is just not acceptable. You're a writer! Worlds flow from your fingertips! Nations tremble at your keystroke! Don't be afraid of the power you wield, and don't succumb to frustration. You have a responsibility to yourself and your audience.

Sure, maybe you're having trouble producing quality writing. Everyone has off days. I'm sure even Hemingway wrote some shit. That doesn't give you an excuse to close your word processor or put your notebook away and vent your frustration on Facebook.

Take responsibility for your writing! Don't let some nebulous idea of a writer's block convince you that you're not going to get anything done today. Sit down at your keyboard and type until it looks like writing. Smash your router to keep from browsing the web. Lock yourself in a closet with a flashlight, a pen and a legal pad. Whatever it takes. You are the writer, and you are in control of your product.

I used to believe that writing was an art. I would sit at my desk and wait for my muse to inspire me, listening to relaxing music and leaving my brain free and open for any beautiful ideas that might happen by.

Then real life happened. I struggled for months to find work writing, and when I did, it was dirty and unglamorous. I wrote insipid articles scattered with keywords like landmines on subjects so dull that I don't actually remember writing them. For my trouble, I received a pittance of a paycheck when I received one at all. I was chained to a desk, pumping out word after word like some sort of diabolical banality device.

Needless to say, I no longer feel these same way about writing.

If I have to be chained to a desk, so does my muse. We work side by side, slaves on the galley of hustle, groaning with effort as we churn away. Writing as art is an unaffordable luxury - for me, words are cheap, and I am their wordmonger.

Like so many misguided youth, I believed it when my parents told me I could be whatever I wanted. Years of rejection and failure have only hardened my resolve in a sort of bitter way. 

Lacking the resources, drive and talent to secure a job as a reporter or even an intern blogger, I have turned to content mills to put food on my table, or at least coffee in my pot. Too stubborn to leave aside the idea that I am a writer, I now peddle words for pennies, a desk for my cart.