Member-only story
Write for love or money
In the end, it’s a numbers game
I’ve been writing for years, not full time and not professionally, but certainly not flippantly. There are piles of journals and notebooks gathering dust on the bookshelf at my parents house, and I’ve composed all manner of prose and verse on Whatsapp and email. I remember writing one of my favourite pieces whilst waiting to see an optician, and another over breakfast in a small terraced house in Wales, on my way to a friend’s wedding.
Before being introduced to the wonderful world of Medium, I’d self published a book of poetry on Kindle and actually sold a few copies, making a little bit of money in the process. I’ve even written short stories specifically to facilitate the teaching of story structure and and some grammar. But I’ve never written for the money. If people only ever wrote for money, I don’t think there’d be more than a handful of writers in the world, and they’d have to rich to start with. The rest would starve to death.
Money can’t be ignored; it’s the blood that keeps the beast alive. No matter how much a population might love writing, if no one ever paid to read it, the ink would soon run dry.
So fundamentally I write for love. But if I want to get good, I have to keep at it, and in most cases if you want to keep at it, you’ve got to make it pay.
