#11: Writing for money isn't writing for myself
Struggling to break away from writing for and about things I don't believe in
On a weekday morning, I fire up my laptop to write yet another article about how great remote learning for young people. Somewhere in a village, at the same time, a daughter loses her father to suicide because he couldn't buy a smartphone for her online classes.
On another morning, I write fanciful sentences about encouraging children to learn to code. During my evening walk, I see a child being dragged from a few precious minutes of play because it's time for coaching, then coding, then bed.
Every night before bed I ask myself, "what the hell am I doing?" And every morning I do it again, because the bills won't pay themselves.
This year has been a hard lesson in the art of balance, and I seem to have lost my notes. After part quitting, part being booted from my previous full-time job (thanks COVID-19), my decision to go freelance was more of a necessity than a choice. I figured it was going to be a hard year, and couldn't afford to have little to no income to tide me through it.
Some of the work I've done so far this year and in the previous years has been completely anonymous. Cruelly, they've also been some of my best work. The thought and research put into it weren't accurately reflected in what I was paid, but intrinsic motivation to do good work kept me going anyway. And every single time I delivered an incredible article, owner rights et al, to be published under someone else's name and never associated with mine, a part of me broke inside. Recently, when a client published a book of my best work—with no mention of my name on it—it hit me that I couldn't go on this way.
Yet other things I've written have been incongruent with what I've read that's happening on ground. The dissonance between what I'm typing and what others are experiencing is palpable. The fight to strike a balance, to pick and choose the better projects even within slim pickings, was torturous. I'm ashamed to say that sometimes, the projects won, but I justify it with the need for income, as if that were any solace.
Where I decided to strike a balance is what I wrote. In many projects, I had complete freedom to write what I wanted, as long as I painted the client in a good light. That sounds easy enough, but the challenge lay in presenting arguments and counter-arguments in such a way that I didn't negate the purpose of my client's existence, but I also told the truth and presented cohesive narratives. It wasn't much, but it was all I could do at the time.
Experience showed me that this is a dilemma a lot of writers face— in particular, those who get sucked into the tangled sticky web of content mills and agencies, and can't find their way out. Content writing is a murky quagmire of a service in India, a landscape pockmarked by poor pay, lack of contracts and a complete and utter disregard of ownership rights.
The average pay per word is anywhere between INR 0.3 to INR 5 — for my friends overseas, that's a measly USD 4 per 1000-word article, regardless of the research, niche, or writing style. INR 0.5 to INR 3 per word is the safe average, and only the creme de la creme can command a higher price (and even then find themselves turned down one too many times).
It's taken for granted that whatever you write is the property of the client, lack of signed contracts notwithstanding. Many clients ask you not to share your work for them on portfolios, so you're not associated with them, and they can keep up the facade of original work. Even more pathetically, one too many organisations ask writers for original samples, only to disappear without a trace and publish the "sample" without permission, payment or discussion of rights.
Raising the issue means getting straight up blocked, and the laws are another murky story of their own and offer no support.
It doesn't help that articles such as these contribute to a larger body of factual grey areas, and are repurposed and rewritten until even the grey becomes the truth. As a result, more important narratives are pushed to the sidelines. Fighting for top ranks in search engines becomes the only driver, cold hard facts be damned.
Despite all this, the industry still thrives. Thousands upon thousands of rupees are paid out to agencies who hire these writers to supply towards a demand. Writers without a choice—and without contracts to safeguard their rights—give in and take their measly pay to run their houses, trying not to think about how they've probably been blatantly cheated for their good work. They may even go so far as to justify it, or pull down the crab that’s trying to get to the top of the kettle with a higher income. And the cycle goes on.
The income is inviting. But the burden of writing with no legacy, for a transient platform that may be wiped out entirely if business decisions warrant that move, is ours alone to bear.
A lot of my sleepless nights this year have been spent writing for similar projects, to have my work disappear into a void with nothing to show for it.
It was only later this year that I bagged a full-time contract that allowed me some respite from the constrictions in my stomach every time I opened a fresh document. I can write what I enjoy writing, associate myself with the organisation with pride, and have a legal contract that would hold up in a court of law, if it ever came to that.
By doing so, I've felt secure enough about dropping some client work I didn't enjoy carrying out. I've been able to write better narratives and explore topics much more honestly without the torturous concern of lost clients and revoked projects. Yet, I’m still holding on to some grey projects, because old habits die hard. I hope I gather the courage and stability to bow out of them in the next year, so I give myself more space to contribute better.
But the majority aren't this lucky. Writers remain stuck, in the swamp that is poorly-paid content writing, while their work does the rounds on the internet, becoming a part of a legacy that they can't attach their name to. It's a cruel world that I hope changes. But quite frankly, as long as we undervalue creative services and leave quality on the doorstep to make room for razor-thin budgets, I don't know if it can.