For years I’ve thought I should write in this newsletter about money. This won’t be that essay, because I don’t know what to tell you. I don’t have enough of a sense about money to form a narrative arc. My relationship with money is less of a tidy tale and more of a bag of snakes.
I listened to a podcast where the guest pointed out how many money words are water-related. Streams of income, liquidity, currency, Scrooge McDuck in a pool of money. I have been thinking so much about creative flow, about being in the river of inspiration, where even if I’m not actively writing, my mind is still working on my story. What if the flow of money and the flow of inspiration were the same river?
I don’t know, I don’t know. I can control my words, but not how much I get paid for them. It feels like the writing is a flowing river, but the money is a faucet I’m waiting for someone else to turn on.
There is a way of making money where I braid myself into the internet. Where I write weekly newsletters, where I craft more classes, where I hunt down podcasts to guest on, and figure out TikTok. People do make money that way. For a while I tried it (except for the TikTok part). People do it, and do it well. But it didn't work for my brain. Braiding myself into the internet causes me to think mainly in the specific language of the internet, and to constantly wonder what the people of the internet are thinking, and mostly what they’re thinking about me.
There is another way of making money as a writer, and that is by shutting out the internet. It’s by writing here infrequently, and not worrying about optimizing my…whatever it is I’m supposed to optimize. It’s about putting words in my notebooks and being offline for huge swaths of time so I can become obsessed with the books I’m writing. I think about doing that and get excited. That sounds amazing.
I am on the tippy edge of this cliff, about to dive off and into the words. I always return to these water metaphors. Writing feels like swimming to me. So often my writing is swimming like someone in water aerobics who just got their hair done, casual sidestrokes and smiles, never submerging. It’s time to dive under. I swim underwater and the world around me shuts out, and all I can see is the pool floor or the lake bed. I’m not trying to get anyone to see me (like Roo telling everyone, “Look at me swimming!” after falling in the stream). I’m deep under, with only the current of my story to guide me.
There is, of course, another way of making money, which is to get a day job. I haven’t had a jobby job since 2003 and frankly I don’t know what I’m qualified to do except write children’s books. I also don’t understand how to write and have a job that takes up hours of the week. The math of it seems impossible to me, and that fact makes me feel fairly dim, because I know plenty of people do it. Loads and loads of people. My closest experience of writing around a time-hungry obligation was when my kids were small and I had to shoehorn the writing into 30-second snippets, but that was a time when I was exhausted, frequently nauseated, and in grad school. I did it, but nothing about it seemed like an ideal schedule.
There is a mythological successful writer, who is focused and inspired, and who writes a book that hits it big and snowballs into best-seller lists and movie deals. The tricky thing for the rest of us is that they aren’t quite mythological. They do exist. They work hard but are also lucky. And I wonder, how hard do I need to work, and in what particular way, in order to get lucky enough to make decent money as a writer?
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