I’m a writer. An amateur, but one serious enough to write a blog post somewhere between five and twenty times a week on average. Serious to have collected one rejection notice a piece for two different items of short fiction and a few rejection notices for a book-length nonfiction piece. Serious enough to apply to graduate school in philosophy, which will be a matter of writing a Ph.D. thesis that I will ideally develop into a New York Times bestseller.
Over the past year, I made $800 as a writer. Theoretically, I made a little more thanks to Google Adsense on my now-abandoned Blogspot blog, but I’m not sure I’ve earned enough pennies to qualify for an actual check from Google, and I know I haven’t earned enough pennies to make it worth worrying whether I’ve earned a check. Yeah, it occurs to me to check right now, but I won’t since I’m writing this on a plane.
So, ignoring Adsense, I made $800, and it all came from one source: an essay I submitted to the Madison philosophy department’s essay contest. It was a little under 2,500 words. Well under 10% of my total writing output for the past year. Under 5%, I’m sure. I didn’t put an especially large amount of effort into it, either. I checked out a few books I thought I had to read to write it, didn’t read them all, and of the new things I read just to write the article, only one longish academic article and one short book section ended up mattering.
I mention all this because I’m reading a book called /The 4-Hour Work Week/ [AMAZON], whose title sounds like rubbish, but has at least one legitimate piece of advice: Most of your productivity often comes from a small portion of your effort. If only I could replicate my $800 success a handful of times per year, I could at least grab a bargain apartment and fill grocery bags without having to rely on a college fund or loans, the ways most college kids do (tuition and insurance would be another matter). If only I knew how to identify those special writing gigs…
First time visitor here – got routed from another blog called Collapsing Waves. I came here to read “Why Prayer?” when I saw this article.
Great post. I’m currently fighting for a raise at my dayjob as a graphic designer on this same principle. Hourly employees are prone, nay, programmed to waste time and productivity. Since they have to ‘milk the clock’ they have to create all sorts of fat when in reality most job descriptions are quite lean.
I recently made some advances in PHP in very short bursts of creative power that just seemed to be correctly timed. These shorts bursts accomplished more than days or weeks of work in other cases..
If you want a publisher’s opinion, the title “The Four Hour Work Week” does not sound like rubbish – on the other hand, it’s appealing and attention grabbing – Just the type of title somebody will grab off the shelf. It’s absurd enough it prompts an instant laugh, sure – but EVERY person in America wants what your title proposes. Who doesn’t want a four-hour work week fer cryin out loud? Great title man, don’t undercut yourself.
I’ve been reading some book called The Peter Principle and aside from its weird phallic implications it is actually a great treatise on the phenomenon of incompetence, and details nicely how people typically do not advance beyond their level of incompetence. I guess this relates because, to return to my job analogy, I’m accomplishing much more in much less time than the previous designer.
Holler at me when you publish this – I’d love to buy a copy.
And congratulations on becoming a professional writer – whether you think you are or not, from all angles over here you definitely have the writing curse.
Chris