Freedom or Tyranny?

This morning, Patti suggested that I look down the road of freelancing again. I’ m not opposed to the idea, but I had a less-than-pleasant experience the last couple of times I’ve trodden that path.

The first time, I was hired on to ghost-write a book on sexual health, specifically dealing with erectile dysfunction. I was told to take given scenarios, some fictional and some anecdotal, and rewrite them to highlight certain methods to improve intimacy. So, I did. At first, everything I wrote was everything they’d ever wanted. I had struck a groove and worked to maintain it. But maybe the client got bored. Maybe they wanted more, I don’t know. Embellishment. More intimacy. More of a positive result (if you get my meaning). Suddenly, everything I wrote was crap. I had changed nothing, but the client had changed everything. I went back and looked at previous work, trying to find a place where I had shifted my style. I reworked my wordings to break up patterns that made things boring. But still, I could not make the client happy. I asked repeatedly for feedback, what they did and did not like, how they wanted me to change the style to suit their needs. Mostly what I got back was the critical version of static. “I don’t know, it just sucks.” “Maybe you could embellish it a bit?” Heat it up. Cool it down. It seemed everything I wrote to address the client’s new wants was not what the client wanted. Eventually, I gave up on the project, a mutual decision that resulted in me getting only a small portion of the money I had been promised. Back of the envelope math showed that, for the hours I spent working on the project, I had earned less than $5 a day for all the writing, revising, meeting, critiquing, and every other “ing” that took place. Since this was several years ago, I wonder if $5 is being generous, but I’ll stick to it for now.

My next attempt at freelancing had me essentially transcribing an interview or lecture into conversational material for a group that helps pharmacy owners expand their business. These interviews and lectures touched on marketing methods and community outreach, things like providing free vitamins for children and holding school supply drives for school-age children who might otherwise not have materials like backpacks, writing utensils, and calculators. Like before, things were great. The client loved my work, and I was enjoying the material I was given. Yeah, I actually enjoyed writing about how seemingly-altruistic actions would ultimately contribute to the pharmacy’s profit margin. I don’t see a problem with making a profit, as long as the actions taken to draw in customers (such as free vitamins for children) are done honestly and with genuine care for the community. And I don’t doubt that the actions presented were presented in that same spirit. I still have the lesson book for how to go over balance sheets, income and cash flow statements, and the like. I just read the “call to action” conclusion I wrote for it, and it is good. The client agreed, and this lesson book went over very well. The client group loved it. More projects came my way from this client, and my point of contact (POC) served not only as a valuable source of work, but as a person I could ask when something was not clear. You see, being neither a pharmacist, a pharmacy owner, nor even a business owner in the sense that their members were, I didn’t understand much of what I was dealing with when it came to more specific things like dealing with inventories, expanding product offerings beyond just the pharmacy counter, or franchising. Maybe the POC got tired of answering questions that may have been basic business 101 for her but were completely new concepts for me—and for many of the client’s members. The relationship soured somewhat, and finally the project came to an end. I as well-paid for my work, garnering advances for work done ahead of schedule and for providing material that went above and beyond their expectations, but when it came to getting a recommendation from the client to show on my profile, the comment was lackluster. Something along the line of, “7/10, good writer, might hire again.”

What I’ve gathered from these two experiences is, freelancing is hard. You have to constantly market yourself and expect rejection for 99 out of 100 proposals you submit. And, judging by the many posts on blogs designed to generate clicks and income (a major source of freelance work, from my recent perusal of the marketplace), it seems that actual writing ability is no longer a priority. Cruising through even the well-known blog sites like Buzzfeed and Raw Story, I see articles rife with grammatical errors, spelling mistakes, a lazy dependence on social media posts rather than actual writing, and a general lack of interest in a well-crafted sentence. And these are from “staff writers,” regular content providers who depend on what I like to call the, “but-Britney-shaved-her-head” level of journalism. (I should add that I went several rounds with a news director, her assistant news director, and her executive producer who all but demanded I put in stories about Britney shaving her head and bashing a car window with a baseball bat in lieu of stories about troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, some of whom came from the air force base literally within the Albuquerque city limits. That contract was terminated early, for that and other reasons that I won’t get into here.)

I’m not opposed to freelancing. It provides a great way for writers to earn a little money working on small projects here and there. It even can provide a good writer with steady work to the point that they could quit their day job and spend their days at the keyboard, which is where any good writer should be and should want to be. But it requires perseverance, a 25/8 mentality, a relentless willingness to self-promote, and a borderline-masochistic tolerance for rejection.

But then, so does job hunting.