A Freelancer Talks Money and Writing

It’s not what you write that’s meaningful, but the time you spend writing.

In 2001, when I started my poetry MFA program, I knew very little about writing. I had no rigor, no creative practice, no writer friends, no manuscript in progress. I had only a handful of sad poems (written literally in tears), some of which had gotten me into said program. That is to say, I was twenty-nothing years old and suffered from clinical depression, strict immigrant parents, and a writerly ego that wanted to be heard.

What I did know was how the business world worked. I had gone to business school, both undergrad and grad, and my classes had taught me that clever content didn’t matter if you didn’t have a bells-and-whistles presentation. My consulting gigs had shown me that who you knew was paramount. And my doctoral research on online purchasing behavior had proved (among other things) that rejection wasn’t personal. It was more of a numbers game.

I also understood instinctively that even if I played the numbers to the hilt, I might still not win (a publication, an agent, a book deal) because . . . white supremacy. I’m not even remotely exaggerating. A 2020 NYT article reported that 95 percent of authors at major houses are white, which isn’t so surprising when 70 percent of the publishing industry, the gatekeepers, are also white.

Taking all of my hardboiled business understanding and extrapolating it to the literary world, I launched my writing career. First, I called myself a writer immediately—and friends, I suggest you do too, if only to embarrass yourself into being one. Second, I worked part-time because the nine-to-five ground me down. I had zero energy for anything afterward, including fun things (like writing or dancing) or life maintenance things (like exercise or cooking healthy meals). This part-time schedule ensured that I would always have time to write, if not always enough money to eat. (Don’t ask me how many times a week I have had popcorn for dinner . . . nutritional yeast is protein, right?) I was also hoping to stave off my main mode of operation: procrastination. If I carved out the time, I would have no excuse not to write. And yes, some days, I only write fifteen minutes a day, but it’s a goddamn beautiful fifteen minutes.

It felt like an epiphany when I decided to become a writer; to take my childish poems, my teenage diaries, my YA thots, and make it into a career. Time had previously felt so out of control, life so long and laborious—and then it all unwound and stretched, the hours filling wholly, easily, joyfully. And there’s the rub. It’s not what you write that’s meaningful, but the time you spend writing. As Elizabeth Gilbert says, your work isn’t your baby. You are its baby.

Either way, my life’s work split in two: one part gloriously creative (also messy, diffuse, scary, obscure), the other part less glorious, but totally manageable, part-time, pay-the-bills. This way, I didn’t have to depend on my writing to make money, face any market-regulated time pressure to finish a piece of work, or have to disrupt or diminish any strange or silly creative vision I might want to follow. Win-win-win.

Over the last twenty years, I’ve tweaked and tailored a part-time freelance lifestyle that leaves me just enough money to live on, and, more importantly, enough time to write. I taught the GMAT for Princeton Review; ran payroll for the geology department at UC Berkeley; was the office manager for a space sciences organization; wrote case studies for a business school professor; edited legal documents for an editing firm; and for one glorious year in 2007, I was a Fulbright Scholar in Bangladesh and India, and my entire job was to write stories and poems and take photographs.

I want to clarify that while my Fulbright year was amazing for its immersion in the creative and traveling life, I wasn’t a million times more productive. You don’t need a Fulbright to make art. If you don’t believe me, channel Audre Lorde, who said poetry was the most economical art form, requiring “the least physical labor, the least material, and the one which can be done between shifts.” Would that we imagined all art not as a luxury, but “a vital necessity of our existence.”

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Currently, I live in Queens, New York, and my four part-time jobs include: editing reports for an environmental geologist in California (around a hundred hours, year-round), teaching a memoir workshop for Queens writers (once a year), tutoring high school students in NYC (ten to fifteen hours a week through the school year), and running a Catapult workshop on personal statements and applying for grants and residencies (every month or two). I average about $50/hour for my time, sometimes less, sometimes more. This doesn’t include the occasional lecture or writing or grant income I get, which might pay anywhere from $0 to $5,000.

This leads me to one of the most important lessons I learned in business school: valuing my time.

I cobble together these income streams into just enough money (around $30,000-$40,000 a year) to pay for rent and food and travel. Luckily, my current jobs are all ongoing gigs and three of them are remote. In the past, I was constantly on the job hunt because of short-term projects. This was no fun and super stressful, even for a financial risk taker like me. So I made efforts to find longer-term, part-time, decent-paying, remote employment. You freelancers know what a hustle this is.

This leads me to one of the most important lessons I learned in business school: valuing my time. I don’t mean in the “protect your creative time” kind of way (although I hope you do that too), but in a “time is money” kind of way. I know this sounds gross, but listen: Corporate people do it and they get paid handsomely, so why shouldn’t artists be valued for their contributions? Ask for a higher stipend or salary. (I can’t emphasize this enough. Please do it. Especially if you’re a woman.) Request application fee waivers. Include prep time in your hours worked. Pay attention to the time you spend working and ask for what you need to make it worth it to you. Keep tabs season to season, year to year, and ask again when things change. The worst that can happen is they’ll say no, and if you approach with respect and compassion for yourself and for the person you’re asking, there’s less chance of fallout. If there is, well then, they probably don’t deserve you.

I’ve been lucky, and I want to explicitly acknowledge some of the privileges I have: I have an educational background with many professional and academic job options (although working part-time severely limits the pay scale). I have no student loan or credit card debt (though I often carry balances on 0% APR credit cards to delay payments on pricier purchases). I am a queen of living large on a shoestring budget even in NYC (there were years of pocketing flasks to bars because I couldn’t afford drinks). I have no children, though I have elderly parents I drop everything to help when they need it. And I have no disabilities or serious medical conditions and so my healthcare costs are low. That all said, I think my general strategies could scale up, even with more challenging costs, debts, or healthcare needs. You might have less time for writing and spend more time working, but you could make a freelance life like this work, even in a wildly expensive city like New York.

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Until I turned forty and moved to NYC, I had no savings plan, because I thought I had too little money. Then an older friend asked me about my (nonexistent) retirement plan, and I was embarrassed into opening an IRA. I’ve been putting one hundred dollars into it every month because I figure even I can afford to “lose” twenty-five dollars each week. But I so wish I had started saving back in the 1990s when I was in my twenties. Instead, since I started in 2013 in my fourth decade, my IRA will amount to $120,000 when I’m seventy, and will not remotely cover a medical crisis in the land of the free. All this is to say that if you are in your twenties or even your thirties, for god’s sake, start an auto-deduction into a Roth IRA now. Even if it’s only five dollars a week, just do it and make it a habit, and increase the amount whenever you feel you can afford it. Just check this simple calculator to see how much a retirement plan could add up for you.

Now, I know I’m weird because balancing my meager budget every month actually chills me out and makes me feel better. But most people aren’t wired like me. Plus you might be thinking, I have a kid! I have credit card debt! I need good health insurance for my chronic condition!

My initial idea for this essay was to survey some of my writer friends, and focus on women, parents, BIPOC, LGBTQIA, and immigrant writers, to see what they had to say about money and the writing life. After all, this is one of the first questions I ask any writer or artist I meet: “How do you make it work?” And all the follow up questions: “How do you make money? How much time do you have for making art? What are your challenges? What are your supports and resources? How has that changed over time? Do you wish you had done it differently? Why?”

I will run this survey eventually, but even then, I don’t intend to have some exhaustive review or blueprint for how to be an artist. It’s just not possible. But what is possible is demystifying the money angle a little. Too often, we don’t talk about money because it’s unseemly. But unseemly to whom? The people whose intergenerational wealth have allowed them to become artists? The ones whose partners make enough money to support their creative endeavors? Many marginalized writers don’t fall into these categories and need the institutional and socialized structures that only exist for a few. These are the artists I want to hear from: the ones who might not even get to dream about being a writer, let alone write a book that makes it onto the latest must-read list.

As I mentioned before, I teach a class on applying to lit mags, grants, and residencies. I believe it’s critical to keep putting your work out there and to ask for monetary support and other resources. But IMHO, this part of the writing and finances equation is more for your writing morale and CV cred, because the grant money, no matter how much, won’t keep you going for that long.

Even a book deal doesn’t guarantee that you’ll be able to fund your writing life. Imagine you get a $50,000 advance for your book, which is a pretty great deal. For reference, I got a $3,000 advance for a two-book deal from HarperCollins India for a memoir and a short story collection. Chances are, it took you a few years to write said book, and $50,000 with a middle-class lifestyle might fund a thrifty year in a major US city, maybe two years in a smaller town (and even that’s a stretch). And then you have to write another great deal of a book.

In my experience, being a writer isn’t the way to fund your writing life. You need another steady source of income so you can keep the lights on and keep writing. But in good news, there are ways to make it work. In even better news, you get to live a life that includes making art. Sure, when I was in business, I made six figures, had nice things, and travelled in style. Now my life is all thrifted, I spend an inordinate amount of time budgeting, and my adventures are planned around places where my friends can host me. But I wouldn’t have it any other way. I’m so much happier because I’ve made my love of writing into a practice, a routine, a ritual. Like the screenwriter Jacob Kreuger says, the end point is not the dream. The process is the dream. On the flip side, my semi-perfect life comes with an unhealthy dose of the age-old artist’s angst about whether anything I write is meaningful.

Talk to your writing teachers, ask your writer friends, reach out to me. I’m genuinely invested in you (yes, you), because your ability to stay in the game makes the writing world richer and wider and funner and truer. I don’t know what your ideal income sources might be, or your minimum hours or pay rate, or your particular challenges and resources. But I want to know. I’m all in for the money and art conversation, because it’s one worth having.