Writing is really, really hard. It’s very difficult to find the kind of success that can make it earn you a living. So why do you write?
I’ve found that if I don’t write, I become a less happy person. Grumpy, and a bit strange. In terms of motivation, I try to keep it about the storytelling and the readers (even if it’s only one). I’m always wary of having financial success or some other numerical metric as the primary motivator, because that can be a fast route to disillusionment.
How about you? What keeps you coming back to the page?
It’s always been fairly simple for me. I think people are what they are. They may pursue other careers to make a living, but they are always drawn to what they are. I’ve been constructing stories since I was old enough to remember being read to. Charlotte’s Web, Runaway Ralph, The Hobbit, The Chronic-(What?!)-cles of Narnia. All started me down the path of storytelling. My mother even subconsciously named me after the profession of storytelling.
So, my motivation is primordial. That doesn’t mean that I’m always doing it right or even well. I fail daily. But I also try daily.
All that to say, there is no true metric for a writer. He or she simply must write.
But I do have some arbitrary metrics. And they’re financial. Stephen King says a successful writer is one who sells what he writes and with that money he pays the bills.
I have a fantasy of selling everything and buying a sailboat. Maybe just living and writing in the Caribbean. But maybe sailing to even more distant shores. With my family of five, I’ve whittled down the monthly expenses (assuming debt-free ownership of the boat) to about $3,500. That’s $42,000 a year net (about $50,000 gross). So, that’s my target as a writer. About what a school teacher makes, but being able to work on my own terms.
I honestly believe that if you write what you naturally enjoy writing and get better and better at it, you will eventually have enough readership to support your writing. At Substack’s average $7/month subscription, you only need fewer than 600 paid subscribers to earn that $3,500. And with the rule of thumb that you will have a roughly 10% paid subscriber base, you need 6,000 subscribers. That’s doable.
I love how specific your measure of success is - having that sailboat to reach towards. Best of luck with closing that gap.
As you say, the current models available to writers are very exciting. The idea of being able to start making a living with a relatively small number of supportive readers is a big sea change - very different to both traditional publishing AND to how online monetisation of content has worked for the last decade+. The problem is scale that affects video creators on YouTube operates quite differently here on Substack.
I’m encouraging my children to start now (11 and 9) to build a Substack and YouTube channel (and whatever other outlets interest them). By the time they’re in their twenties, they could conceivably generate enough income (as young single people) to be able to make life choices not bound by dollars and cents.
It’s different starting when you’re older (I’ll be 49 this summer), but not impossible. There is also a bit of earned experience that informs your craft and your business savvy. But starting as soon as possible is always the best choice (like investing).
I like to break down my motivational goals to dollars and cents. It can be a deterrent or a prod to get me going. Depends on the time of day.
I seek that 1000 super fans goal. Any career is possible if you have that. And with my super expensive lifestyle of owning a home, kids, wife, livestock and fur baby hungry mouths to feed it surely increased my goals of day, a decade ago when it was just me, myself, and I.
So, to quantify my measure of success, autonomy, and security, I would require no less than $75k/yr gross. But, taking into account we are moving to a more desirable location that will mean a higher tax bracket and mortgage, etc. My wife would never let me quit my very secure (permanently work from home, yay) job unless I was safely earning $100k/yr and for an entire calendar year. Of which I do not blame her. It one thing to reach the goal. It is quite another to rely on hundreds of strangers to help you sustain it monthly. We know this from the Patreon she currently has had for over 5 years that accounts for about 1/4 of what I bring home a month. Yay for supplemental income. But that number fluctuates much too much to rely on a set amount every month. Some months it’s 4 digits but every now and again it’s just 3 digits and then we’re in trouble. No way to live...but I digress...all this to say, as a person who lives in spreadsheets both for work and personal stuff, I can relate...
Most likely, the only way to maintain a somewhat balanced budget as a writer is to diversify. Much like stock investing, having several income streams is the only way to maintain some sort of “income” as a writer. I’m branching out into editing, recording a new album, writing screenplays, performing locally, and doing house concerts. We’ll see how these hustles coalesce into something realistically equivalent to a salary.
I used a cheat code earlier in life: I joined the Marines. As a lieutenant colonel, I make roughly $140,000 a year and when I retire in two years, I will net about $4,000 a month in perpetuity. That was my Plan B and it’s worked okay over the years. So, my sailboat dream isn’t too far-fetched. But I would like to see my pension doubled by my writing efforts. Time will tell.
Because it’s a total blast! I love eliciting emotions in others with stories (i.e. entirely made up scenarios that at one point lived solely in my head). We writers are pretty magical-- we make words come out of our fingers and weave them into something real that others can feel and respond to. ✨📝
I'm sure I read someone famous once describe it as a form of slow telepathy. Transferring thoughts from one person - the writer - into the mind of another - the reader. It can be such a powerful tool for empathy.
I see art as one mind reaching out across the void to other minds and asking, do you see it too? Is life like this for you too? And the great difficulty in this is not the answer, but in fully expressing the question. That's the motive: to fully ask the question I want to ask.
Love that. It's also why every writer can bring something unique to the table (regardless of 'how many stories' there are supposed to be in the world). A story idea might not be unique, but the mind filtering it onto the page definitely is.
Yes, and that is also why I don't worry about AI taking over art. However clever it may be, it is not human, and it is the connection of one human mind to another that we crave.
Yeah, I came to the same conclusion recently about AI creations. AI will absolutely shake up the creative industries in all sorts of ways - I can imagine generic airport page-turners being AI generated and doing quite well, marketed to people who just want a good romp and don't really care about that human connection. Airbrush images of wolves howling at the moon will likely move to being AI generated and printed onto t-shirts for shops in Glastonbury - but that kind of image isn't about forming a connection with another human artist, because the artist was anonymous to start with. So yes, in all industries there'll be a specific tier of image and word creation that will disappear in favour of AI creation. Some copywriters (the ones who all sound the same and specialise in Professional Corporate Copy) are definitely at risk of losing their work.
Aside from all that, I think AI tools will do two things for most creators and readers/movie viewers/etc. 1. Some artists will use AI tools to do incredible things that wouldn't have been possible before (or would have taken too long) and 2. It'll encourage all of us humans to simply *try harder*. If our prose reads like AI generated words, that's a pretty good motivator to write more interesting prose.
AI generation will only get better and better, but the leap to actual cognitive, self-aware AI I presume is still a very long way away (if anyone knows otherwise, do let me know!). Once we hit that point it's another big shift again, and the discussion alters once more. If an AI machine is conscious and independent, that has massive implications for all sorts of things, including art.
It will be interesting to see where the boundary line settles. If AI does start writing airport books, then it will be yet another think Orwell got right in 1984. But I am not convinced that AI generation will get better and better. I think there is a good chance it is already at or near the limits of its model. People talk about how many more billion parameters the next version will have, but there is a point at which looking at more of the same doesn't add much new information.
We might ask ourselves how much we would understand about the world if we had read all the books in the world and seen all the pictures, but didn't have a body, didn't have eyes or ears or arms or legs, had never felt the sun on our cheeks or the wind in our hair. Not very well is my guess.
And in the tech industry generally, we see the marketing hype and the predictions of rapid revolutionary development peak at just about the point that the technology plateaus. Just think about the wearables revolution that was suppose to change all our lives as we moved from phones to watches and headsets and implants. And since that hype wave, what we have actually seen is phones getting better battery life and more pixels, to the point where there is no longer much incentive to trade in a phone just because the next generation is out. All of the other stuff has fizzled, just as the metaverse has fizzled and crypto has fizzled. Sometimes the horizon seems limitless because you have reached to top of the mountain.
I think part of that is that the tech industry accidentally stumbled into the realms of culture and society, then mistakenly thought they understood it, and have been slowly discovering that they really, really don't. Hence the tech bros in particular being especially ill-equipped to understand the complexities of social media, and yet here we are.
I adored Asimov's robot stories when I was a teenager. Part of me is still excited at that prospect, but the key difference is that those stories were never boring. ChatGPT (currently at least) is remarkable in many ways and technologically astonishing, but it really is quite fundamentally dull - at least in terms of creating new work.
Hi, Simon (first comment yay). It's the same for me! I've written stories ever since I learned how to write & never really stopped. I get grumpy & short-tempered when I don't write which I call my withdrawal symptoms. But that's not really why I write.
Writing stories is the most exciting challenge for me. There are some rules that people generally agree on but they can be bent, even broken. Success vs. failure is very clearly defined but there's a variety of ways to get there. To be honest, sharing is an integral part of storytelling for me so I do define 'success' of a story in terms of how readers liked it although I know some people are perfectly happy just writing for themselves. I'm just not one of them.
I hear coding & sciences like math & physics scratch the same itch for many: the problem-solving itch. For me, the problem solving occurs when I try to figure out the shape of the story as I write, how to get from plot point A to plot point B etc. Then it occurs again when I try to make the writing as clear & appealing as possible during revision & editing. To me, it's the most interesting, most fun game there is.
Hi, Vanessa! I absolutely agree with the idea of writing having puzzle elements. When a character motivation slots into a plot beat, thereby illustrating an important theme of the book, it feels like solving a puzzle. When I'm actively writing, it's more of a flow state, but when I'm planning and thinking about what's coming up, it's definitely problem solving and the satisfaction of finding elegant solutions.
I find that being a writer, if not a huge source of dolla bills, is still hugely rewarding in so many other areas. I write to get to experience parallel lives I didn’t choose- my characters have jobs I think I‘d be happy doing, but didn’t ultimately choose. I also love the way writing changes the way I view the world. Instead of seeing an ordinary crappy day as a problem, I can fairly easily convert it into good material.
Like you Simon, I‘m far happier when puzzling through a novel. I write a lot of nonfiction as a writing teacher- by volume more than fiction- but it‘s the itch of a novel that needs scratching for me to feel like myself.
I've been thinking about that recently: that sense of experiencing or meeting your characters. With all my novels, there's been a tipping point after which my characters suddenly feel lot more real, when the craft clicks into place and I no longer have to concentrate quite so hard to summon their voices. I've hit that point with Triverse in the last couple of months, with the places and the characters being suddenly more solid and real in my head.
I don't subscribe to the "they came alive and just wrote themselves!" thing, but I do understand the notion. It's when as a writer you properly understand a character, and you instinctively know how they'd react in any given situation.
I still slightly miss hanging out with characters from my earlier books.
Initially, I was gonna be somewhat pithy and throw in a simple, "it amuses me," but reading the well reasoned comments here threw me into a reflective mood.
I've done fiction (prose and script), TTRPG game design, and article writing. I've acted, set designed, sound design, makeup designe, costume design, and composed music for theater, TV and film. I've done photography, videography, animation, and motion design. I've been paid for all of it. Only the videography, music and sound design have ever generated enough work to pay my bills, depending on the year.
I am very much an unfocused dilettante. If I knuckled down and committed to only a couple of these areas, I would be (maybe) more financially successful. The sound and video is where I focused on income in the past 20 years, and, for about half of those, I made significant sums. But, once those become focus for income they become less fun. After a while weddings can be downright tedious... Rodeos were always exciting, because I'd be the fool by the bull-pen, sticking a lens in a pissed-off bull's face - and, yes, I have clips of bulls attacking me, and, yes, it's clear I was the target of the animal's anger. Bands were usually fun (again, on-stage handheld), because I could amuse myself trying to layer up good foreground-to-background depth and see how much lens flare I could get. Here my directors were being nice to me, because they knew I'd get bored on a telephoto tripod and that I'd work to create interesting accent shots.
But, the key point is ALL of this is storytelling. Makeup, set, costume, sound design are all subsets, but all are in service of the script. Same with acting and directing. Same for photo/video framing. Even boring old tithe sequences or advertising graphics are storytelling (even if the story is "BUY THIS!").
So, dammit, I'm an arty-farty person.
Writing is still the one I typically do for myself. I don't enjoy the physical act of typing - I'm still slow, and recently adjusting from a US keyboard to International English keyboard has sucked... (The main difference is the Enter/Return key. You are used to a tall-but-narrow key with the "/" to the left of the bottom of the Enter. I am used to a wide-but-short Enter with the "/" where the top of your Enter key would be. Right now I'm typing a lot of "/" instead of carriage returns. Who makes these decisions?)
So, when I write a thing, it's for me. When I share it, I really don't care what other's think. I already know some will like, other's won't. A read is a win.
What will be my "Magnum Opus," is still in long-slow prep. Not to compare myself to Tolkien, but he's one who spent 20 years on his backstory before publishing one tale in the setting, and another 15 years of refinement before publishing the trilogy. The themes and outlines of what I want to say are pretty solid (but revised as I age). Most of my main characters are fleshed out and detailed (and revised as I age and revise the themes), but the requirements of the story require a fully global set of societies at three major epochs, and my "core gimmick," makes that a major undertaking which has a few more requirements than simply time periods A, B, and C.
But, even when I get into the main writing, it'll still be for me.
I always enjoyed editing non-fiction video, because of the puzzle solving aspect of finding a story in a collection of otherwise random clips. Sometimes assembling fictional prose can feel a bit like that as well, albeit with more control over the random clips (but also, infinite choice).
I write ( still ) because it's one of the few things I got positive reinforcement about as a kid. I love to write, I love to create fictional human beings that real human beings adore or despise. Publishing that writing daily on Substack can have its negative side, but it certainly keeps me focused and has made me a better writer.
Yours is an inspiring Substack, Jimmy! At the moment I'm committed to a long-form project, but I'm definitely intrigued by the shorter fiction that you specialise in. It seems to fit the medium very well.
Thanks. Substack doesn't seem very impressed by an unknown who is ranked just behind Palahniuk. If they could get some more eyes on this platform we'd all do better.
Oh, weird! I'd have thought they'd be all over what you're doing. Being able to provide a platform that works equally for long-established trad pub megastars and independent writers? That's the holy grail, surely?
On Twitter, the new " Publisher Liaison" rarely retweets any Substack content. When there is a new feature, it's always something that involves the interior/existing writers. I don't see them expanding the reach or making the brand hip. They said that consistent content production would convert free subscribers. I don't see it after 30 months of daily writing.
Your little Substack tick indicates you've had some success on that front, though, at least! I'm currently finding I'm coming in waaaaay below the suggested 5-10% conversion rate.
I'm happy I've had some success, but I am below 365 paid subscribers, which means some days I pay Stripe for the privilege of having an account. I really believed the quality and frequency of my writing would bring me at least 1000 subscribers by the 2 1/2 year mark. At some point either Substack has to want to retain me by supplementing my income, or they have to do something to make the platform more popular. I would make more money as assistant manager at a Dairy Queen
I lovd to write, and I belong to a writing group that meets weekly. I have been working on a historical novel series since 2018, currently halfway through the sequel. It opened in Southwestern Virginia in the last year of the Civil War, and now my protagonist is in Prussia. No hope of finding an agent or publisher, and I am holding off for now on exploring self-publishing options. I would not have been able to sustain this work without my writing group. I write for them.
Having a group is really helpful, agreed. I've essentially treated my online audience as a sort of general focus group. Since switching to Substack I've now also found an amazing group of global writers (as can be seen from all the incredible responses on this topic!).
Writing is an intuitive piece of me, a ritual of 'righting,' a calling that both seduces and screws with my mind. Motivation is supposed to be the reason behind the action. It's served me well in some regards, as memory keeper, value gauge, $ maker--eludes me in other ways. While I've earned a good living applying writing, rhetoric, and reasoning to Gov't & Corp jobs, I was in essence a ghost writer. In the margins I wrote stories, poems, novels, and blog or editoral'ized. I don't do it for $, to acquire followers, or to say 'look at me/my life.' Perhaps in those margins and blank spaces, I do entertain the thought that after I die, someone will care to read about what I knew, questioned, or found fascinating or awful. And it will light a spark in someone, somewhere.
For me, I think most of the important ways I experience the world came through words I’d read. I’d like to do that for others. Be a link in the literary chain of joy. But, I usually need a deadline for motivation. I think I’m an outlier in that I lack the intrinsic drive. For me, I need to know I have a potential reader/audience. Otherwise I have to just imagine I will someday if I work hard enough, but I’m just as prone to imagine I’m fooling myself as I am to mentally picture smiling grandkids.
I was never able to write productively (ie, actually finish projects and get them out into the world) until I started serialising my stuff around 2015. I definitely have that need for external motivation.
I'm always 'writing' things in my head, so actually writing them down is my main mode of self expression. Sometimes I forget that writing is fun and need to to remember that, there was a time in college where I realized that. Writing for all the writer's workshops was making me feel insecure and all that (ten page max short stories are so not my thing), but sharing fanfiction online and seeing comments that people liked it reminded me that I enjoyed writing.
Recognition is also something that drives me. I need to know that people read what I write and think something about it, on substack and fanfiction websites comments are like gold to me. 'I want to write this so I can show it to my writer friends' is a common motivator for me.
The characters and the story around the characters. I come up with a concept and until I see it on the page it almost “haunts” me and won’t leave my mind. That’s also how I gauge if a story is worth pursuing. I never just go with a new idea. I wait a few days, sometimes a month and if the idea (not written down) is still very present in my mind then I will run like the wind and tell it!
Unfortunately, every idea I have sticks with me and invades my mind all at once so it becomes hard to focus and finish one thing at a time so at the end of the day nothing gets done. Still working out how to solve that problem.
Yeah, the idea of getting partway through a project and discovering it's not the right one always worries me!
So far, the idea for my next book has always appeared during the writing of the previous one, which has been convenient. But I do have to then sit on it until the current project is done, which can be a challenge. :) The good thing about that is that the new idea percolates in my mind, so that by the time I actually get to it I already know a lot about it.
I used to hop around multiple projects as new ideas came to me, which was fun in the short term but ultimately meant I never finished anything. That was a creatively very unsatisfying time - I'm much happier focusing on one project at a time now.
Whole different ball game if you're under contract and you don't feel like it. Then you write because that's what pays the bills, even though you know an editor might screw with your work later and murder your babies.
I suppose the flipside is that you're under contract and thus getting paid. It's hard to find that balance of control over your work and professional reward.
It is, but it doesn't matter how much you love it sometimes when you're getting paid you REALLY, REALLY don't feel like it. Ironically doing this Substack, which I earn nothing from, is so much fun. Trouble is, I'm all about content really and prosaic things like finding subscribers (clients if you will in old parlance) was what an agent was for and that's how they earnt their 10%. I personally know no professional writers (and I know quite a few) who are anywhere near remotely good at marketing themselves.
It's quite difficult to become professional at something and still maintain that original love for it. Even the best job in the world has its boring bits and drudgery, and if you couple that with it NEEDING to pay your rent/mortgage/food bills and it all suddenly gets a lot more serious...
Agree it's a great question. For me, it also depends on the context.
I guess at its root, writing for me feels like part of my being, part of who I am and how I am able to live more fully and make sense of my thoughts or observations.
I also try to keep the need for money away from my novel writing, rather focusing on the journey and the message vs what sells. I don't think there's anything wrong for going for sales primarily! But as we know, it's also a tough game. So I feel totally free if I write this way. I feel best if I'm able to start my day writing, even if just for a short while.
But then writing is something so powerful to express ideas and make little ripples in the world. I guess I see my Substack like this, and if it makes some money as well to allow me to spend more time doing this, then even better.
Teaching writing is likewise a passion and longtime focus of mine, mainly as a high school teacher but also at university and soon to come in a different format. I think it's so wonderful to help anybody use writing as a powerful tool for themselves or for others. Somehow, I've got to make a living, so that ends up being the core of it, even though it also complements the writing I do myself.
Agreed! That's why I spend so much time writing behind-the-scenes material and exploring and chronicling my writing experiences: just in case it helps someone else. Writing can be seen a solitary thing, but I' benefited so much from the wider writer community over the years that it feels very natural to want to give back to it.
I like this question. I suppose I have different reasons for writing depending on what I'm writing.
I'm a pastor and teacher, so I find joy and purpose in helping people grow in their relationship to God by helping them to understand the Bible.
I am writing a novel because I enjoy fleshing out the characters as I set them in conflict with each other - the ins and outs of daily life, the tragedy, the triumphs, the losses and the wins - so that eventually they learn or grow, or sometimes die, but somehow they make their mark and improve their world.
I have written curricula for a bible school, white papers on certain aspects of health, essays on various topics, articles on a myriad subjects, book and movie reviews...
Wow! I guess I've dabbled in a lot of areas of writing, and I keep coming back to the page because something inside me really needs this outlet to communicate with others.
Thank you for encouraging me to think about the question, and for sharing your thoughts about motivation to write.
Words have power! I think your very varied examples demonstrate that rather neatly. :) Sounds like you have to shift gears a lot - do you find them to be quite different disciplines (eg writing for fiction vs writing a school curriculum) or does it feel like it's coming from a similar place?
The fiction I write contains characters in deep need of redemption - some are what our society might call throw-away people. My understanding of the nature of God is that His love is never-failing, though we, His Creation, often fail Him, and get ourselves into deep trouble at times of our own volition. To this extent my fiction is deeply rooted in my faith in Him and in His Word; if we come to Him and believe in Him, He promises to redeem us. That includes loving and guiding us.
With this in mind, it does seem there is a common foundation for my fiction and my Bible teaching, devotional writings, etc.
To try to say all the other forms of my writing comes from somewhere else seems artificial. It is like saying my kitchen is set apart from the rest of my house - that it has a foundation completely separate and unattached. I may enjoy the kitchen more than other rooms in the house, but they are all connected.
Gear-shifting: If anything is different for me, it would be the head space required to write colorful, meaningful characters vs. the discipline it requires to fastidiously examine passages of Scripture in order to accomplish effective exposition.
Thank you for your response. This is an enlightening conversation for me.
Much the same in many ways as how the issues I find important and interesting in life are the ones that infuse my fiction. As a humanist (mostly, more-or-less), the themes in my books can be fairly easily tied to that perspective on life. Part of the fascinating challenge in writing is to write characters who *don't* see the world from that perspective.
Glad you're enjoying the conversation! Substack seems to foster a very high calibre of community interaction, I've found.
My dog got cancer so I wrote my first novella in years (that novella is tangentially related to the experience). Before that, I was making a video game and I needed a story, so I wrote a novel as practice. Right now, I’m writing because it’s an inherently difficult and complex practice and I’m really enjoying trying to figure it out. All the experimentation involved has been fun
I write because it is a creative outlet for me. Like making music. Or comics. If people like my creativity, I am happy. Sure, I would love to make my living doing creative things, but that is an extremely difficult road to travel. And your creativity can start to feel like work. So I see writing as a hobby that earns a little. But not enough to stress about it or chase it full time. I do it for the audience appreciation. The applause/likes/comments. Without an audience, I probably wouldn’t write.
But I would make music regardless of whether I had an audience. So I guess I am a musician who also writes.
It's an intuitive piece of me, a ritual of 'righting,' a calling that both seduces and screws with my mind. Motivation is supposed to be the reason behind the action. It's served me well in some regards, as memory keeper, value gauge, $ maker--eludes me in other ways. While I've earned a good living applying writing, rhetoric, and reasoning to Gov't & Corp jobs, I may as well have been a ghost writer. In the margins I wrote stories, poems, novels, and blog or editoral'ized. I don't do it for $, to acquire followers, or to say 'look at me/my life.' Perhaps in those margins and blank spaces, I do entertain the thought that after I die, someone will care to read about what I knew, questioned, or found fascinating or awful. And it will light a spark in someone, somewhere.
Writers write.
Also, painters paint. Leaders lead. Runners run. Teachers teach. Mathematicians (mathers?) math.
It’s always been fairly simple for me. I think people are what they are. They may pursue other careers to make a living, but they are always drawn to what they are. I’ve been constructing stories since I was old enough to remember being read to. Charlotte’s Web, Runaway Ralph, The Hobbit, The Chronic-(What?!)-cles of Narnia. All started me down the path of storytelling. My mother even subconsciously named me after the profession of storytelling.
So, my motivation is primordial. That doesn’t mean that I’m always doing it right or even well. I fail daily. But I also try daily.
All that to say, there is no true metric for a writer. He or she simply must write.
But I do have some arbitrary metrics. And they’re financial. Stephen King says a successful writer is one who sells what he writes and with that money he pays the bills.
I have a fantasy of selling everything and buying a sailboat. Maybe just living and writing in the Caribbean. But maybe sailing to even more distant shores. With my family of five, I’ve whittled down the monthly expenses (assuming debt-free ownership of the boat) to about $3,500. That’s $42,000 a year net (about $50,000 gross). So, that’s my target as a writer. About what a school teacher makes, but being able to work on my own terms.
I honestly believe that if you write what you naturally enjoy writing and get better and better at it, you will eventually have enough readership to support your writing. At Substack’s average $7/month subscription, you only need fewer than 600 paid subscribers to earn that $3,500. And with the rule of thumb that you will have a roughly 10% paid subscriber base, you need 6,000 subscribers. That’s doable.
So, there’s a motivational goal. ✍️ ⛵️ 🏝️
I love how specific your measure of success is - having that sailboat to reach towards. Best of luck with closing that gap.
As you say, the current models available to writers are very exciting. The idea of being able to start making a living with a relatively small number of supportive readers is a big sea change - very different to both traditional publishing AND to how online monetisation of content has worked for the last decade+. The problem is scale that affects video creators on YouTube operates quite differently here on Substack.
I’m encouraging my children to start now (11 and 9) to build a Substack and YouTube channel (and whatever other outlets interest them). By the time they’re in their twenties, they could conceivably generate enough income (as young single people) to be able to make life choices not bound by dollars and cents.
It’s different starting when you’re older (I’ll be 49 this summer), but not impossible. There is also a bit of earned experience that informs your craft and your business savvy. But starting as soon as possible is always the best choice (like investing).
I like to break down my motivational goals to dollars and cents. It can be a deterrent or a prod to get me going. Depends on the time of day.
I seek that 1000 super fans goal. Any career is possible if you have that. And with my super expensive lifestyle of owning a home, kids, wife, livestock and fur baby hungry mouths to feed it surely increased my goals of day, a decade ago when it was just me, myself, and I.
So, to quantify my measure of success, autonomy, and security, I would require no less than $75k/yr gross. But, taking into account we are moving to a more desirable location that will mean a higher tax bracket and mortgage, etc. My wife would never let me quit my very secure (permanently work from home, yay) job unless I was safely earning $100k/yr and for an entire calendar year. Of which I do not blame her. It one thing to reach the goal. It is quite another to rely on hundreds of strangers to help you sustain it monthly. We know this from the Patreon she currently has had for over 5 years that accounts for about 1/4 of what I bring home a month. Yay for supplemental income. But that number fluctuates much too much to rely on a set amount every month. Some months it’s 4 digits but every now and again it’s just 3 digits and then we’re in trouble. No way to live...but I digress...all this to say, as a person who lives in spreadsheets both for work and personal stuff, I can relate...
Most likely, the only way to maintain a somewhat balanced budget as a writer is to diversify. Much like stock investing, having several income streams is the only way to maintain some sort of “income” as a writer. I’m branching out into editing, recording a new album, writing screenplays, performing locally, and doing house concerts. We’ll see how these hustles coalesce into something realistically equivalent to a salary.
I used a cheat code earlier in life: I joined the Marines. As a lieutenant colonel, I make roughly $140,000 a year and when I retire in two years, I will net about $4,000 a month in perpetuity. That was my Plan B and it’s worked okay over the years. So, my sailboat dream isn’t too far-fetched. But I would like to see my pension doubled by my writing efforts. Time will tell.
For me, I guess it's pretty simple. I write because I enjoy the process, and to create the kind of stories I want to read.
Because it’s a total blast! I love eliciting emotions in others with stories (i.e. entirely made up scenarios that at one point lived solely in my head). We writers are pretty magical-- we make words come out of our fingers and weave them into something real that others can feel and respond to. ✨📝
I'm sure I read someone famous once describe it as a form of slow telepathy. Transferring thoughts from one person - the writer - into the mind of another - the reader. It can be such a powerful tool for empathy.
Sweet description.
I see art as one mind reaching out across the void to other minds and asking, do you see it too? Is life like this for you too? And the great difficulty in this is not the answer, but in fully expressing the question. That's the motive: to fully ask the question I want to ask.
Love that. It's also why every writer can bring something unique to the table (regardless of 'how many stories' there are supposed to be in the world). A story idea might not be unique, but the mind filtering it onto the page definitely is.
Yes, and that is also why I don't worry about AI taking over art. However clever it may be, it is not human, and it is the connection of one human mind to another that we crave.
Yeah, I came to the same conclusion recently about AI creations. AI will absolutely shake up the creative industries in all sorts of ways - I can imagine generic airport page-turners being AI generated and doing quite well, marketed to people who just want a good romp and don't really care about that human connection. Airbrush images of wolves howling at the moon will likely move to being AI generated and printed onto t-shirts for shops in Glastonbury - but that kind of image isn't about forming a connection with another human artist, because the artist was anonymous to start with. So yes, in all industries there'll be a specific tier of image and word creation that will disappear in favour of AI creation. Some copywriters (the ones who all sound the same and specialise in Professional Corporate Copy) are definitely at risk of losing their work.
Aside from all that, I think AI tools will do two things for most creators and readers/movie viewers/etc. 1. Some artists will use AI tools to do incredible things that wouldn't have been possible before (or would have taken too long) and 2. It'll encourage all of us humans to simply *try harder*. If our prose reads like AI generated words, that's a pretty good motivator to write more interesting prose.
AI generation will only get better and better, but the leap to actual cognitive, self-aware AI I presume is still a very long way away (if anyone knows otherwise, do let me know!). Once we hit that point it's another big shift again, and the discussion alters once more. If an AI machine is conscious and independent, that has massive implications for all sorts of things, including art.
It will be interesting to see where the boundary line settles. If AI does start writing airport books, then it will be yet another think Orwell got right in 1984. But I am not convinced that AI generation will get better and better. I think there is a good chance it is already at or near the limits of its model. People talk about how many more billion parameters the next version will have, but there is a point at which looking at more of the same doesn't add much new information.
We might ask ourselves how much we would understand about the world if we had read all the books in the world and seen all the pictures, but didn't have a body, didn't have eyes or ears or arms or legs, had never felt the sun on our cheeks or the wind in our hair. Not very well is my guess.
And in the tech industry generally, we see the marketing hype and the predictions of rapid revolutionary development peak at just about the point that the technology plateaus. Just think about the wearables revolution that was suppose to change all our lives as we moved from phones to watches and headsets and implants. And since that hype wave, what we have actually seen is phones getting better battery life and more pixels, to the point where there is no longer much incentive to trade in a phone just because the next generation is out. All of the other stuff has fizzled, just as the metaverse has fizzled and crypto has fizzled. Sometimes the horizon seems limitless because you have reached to top of the mountain.
I think part of that is that the tech industry accidentally stumbled into the realms of culture and society, then mistakenly thought they understood it, and have been slowly discovering that they really, really don't. Hence the tech bros in particular being especially ill-equipped to understand the complexities of social media, and yet here we are.
I adored Asimov's robot stories when I was a teenager. Part of me is still excited at that prospect, but the key difference is that those stories were never boring. ChatGPT (currently at least) is remarkable in many ways and technologically astonishing, but it really is quite fundamentally dull - at least in terms of creating new work.
My only rule of writing is "don't be boring." Everything else is secondary. A well-written boring story, is still a boring story.
And, hopefully, I will long gone before AI become sentient and eliminates "flawed, organic lifeforms." 🤣 (Nervous laughter. Only half-joking.)
Spoken like a true philosopher.
Hi, Simon (first comment yay). It's the same for me! I've written stories ever since I learned how to write & never really stopped. I get grumpy & short-tempered when I don't write which I call my withdrawal symptoms. But that's not really why I write.
Writing stories is the most exciting challenge for me. There are some rules that people generally agree on but they can be bent, even broken. Success vs. failure is very clearly defined but there's a variety of ways to get there. To be honest, sharing is an integral part of storytelling for me so I do define 'success' of a story in terms of how readers liked it although I know some people are perfectly happy just writing for themselves. I'm just not one of them.
I hear coding & sciences like math & physics scratch the same itch for many: the problem-solving itch. For me, the problem solving occurs when I try to figure out the shape of the story as I write, how to get from plot point A to plot point B etc. Then it occurs again when I try to make the writing as clear & appealing as possible during revision & editing. To me, it's the most interesting, most fun game there is.
Hi, Vanessa! I absolutely agree with the idea of writing having puzzle elements. When a character motivation slots into a plot beat, thereby illustrating an important theme of the book, it feels like solving a puzzle. When I'm actively writing, it's more of a flow state, but when I'm planning and thinking about what's coming up, it's definitely problem solving and the satisfaction of finding elegant solutions.
I find that being a writer, if not a huge source of dolla bills, is still hugely rewarding in so many other areas. I write to get to experience parallel lives I didn’t choose- my characters have jobs I think I‘d be happy doing, but didn’t ultimately choose. I also love the way writing changes the way I view the world. Instead of seeing an ordinary crappy day as a problem, I can fairly easily convert it into good material.
Like you Simon, I‘m far happier when puzzling through a novel. I write a lot of nonfiction as a writing teacher- by volume more than fiction- but it‘s the itch of a novel that needs scratching for me to feel like myself.
Thanks for posing the question!
I've been thinking about that recently: that sense of experiencing or meeting your characters. With all my novels, there's been a tipping point after which my characters suddenly feel lot more real, when the craft clicks into place and I no longer have to concentrate quite so hard to summon their voices. I've hit that point with Triverse in the last couple of months, with the places and the characters being suddenly more solid and real in my head.
I don't subscribe to the "they came alive and just wrote themselves!" thing, but I do understand the notion. It's when as a writer you properly understand a character, and you instinctively know how they'd react in any given situation.
I still slightly miss hanging out with characters from my earlier books.
Initially, I was gonna be somewhat pithy and throw in a simple, "it amuses me," but reading the well reasoned comments here threw me into a reflective mood.
I've done fiction (prose and script), TTRPG game design, and article writing. I've acted, set designed, sound design, makeup designe, costume design, and composed music for theater, TV and film. I've done photography, videography, animation, and motion design. I've been paid for all of it. Only the videography, music and sound design have ever generated enough work to pay my bills, depending on the year.
I am very much an unfocused dilettante. If I knuckled down and committed to only a couple of these areas, I would be (maybe) more financially successful. The sound and video is where I focused on income in the past 20 years, and, for about half of those, I made significant sums. But, once those become focus for income they become less fun. After a while weddings can be downright tedious... Rodeos were always exciting, because I'd be the fool by the bull-pen, sticking a lens in a pissed-off bull's face - and, yes, I have clips of bulls attacking me, and, yes, it's clear I was the target of the animal's anger. Bands were usually fun (again, on-stage handheld), because I could amuse myself trying to layer up good foreground-to-background depth and see how much lens flare I could get. Here my directors were being nice to me, because they knew I'd get bored on a telephoto tripod and that I'd work to create interesting accent shots.
But, the key point is ALL of this is storytelling. Makeup, set, costume, sound design are all subsets, but all are in service of the script. Same with acting and directing. Same for photo/video framing. Even boring old tithe sequences or advertising graphics are storytelling (even if the story is "BUY THIS!").
So, dammit, I'm an arty-farty person.
Writing is still the one I typically do for myself. I don't enjoy the physical act of typing - I'm still slow, and recently adjusting from a US keyboard to International English keyboard has sucked... (The main difference is the Enter/Return key. You are used to a tall-but-narrow key with the "/" to the left of the bottom of the Enter. I am used to a wide-but-short Enter with the "/" where the top of your Enter key would be. Right now I'm typing a lot of "/" instead of carriage returns. Who makes these decisions?)
So, when I write a thing, it's for me. When I share it, I really don't care what other's think. I already know some will like, other's won't. A read is a win.
What will be my "Magnum Opus," is still in long-slow prep. Not to compare myself to Tolkien, but he's one who spent 20 years on his backstory before publishing one tale in the setting, and another 15 years of refinement before publishing the trilogy. The themes and outlines of what I want to say are pretty solid (but revised as I age). Most of my main characters are fleshed out and detailed (and revised as I age and revise the themes), but the requirements of the story require a fully global set of societies at three major epochs, and my "core gimmick," makes that a major undertaking which has a few more requirements than simply time periods A, B, and C.
But, even when I get into the main writing, it'll still be for me.
I always enjoyed editing non-fiction video, because of the puzzle solving aspect of finding a story in a collection of otherwise random clips. Sometimes assembling fictional prose can feel a bit like that as well, albeit with more control over the random clips (but also, infinite choice).
Editing video is the fun part.
Logging footage is not.
I write ( still ) because it's one of the few things I got positive reinforcement about as a kid. I love to write, I love to create fictional human beings that real human beings adore or despise. Publishing that writing daily on Substack can have its negative side, but it certainly keeps me focused and has made me a better writer.
Yours is an inspiring Substack, Jimmy! At the moment I'm committed to a long-form project, but I'm definitely intrigued by the shorter fiction that you specialise in. It seems to fit the medium very well.
Thanks. Substack doesn't seem very impressed by an unknown who is ranked just behind Palahniuk. If they could get some more eyes on this platform we'd all do better.
Oh, weird! I'd have thought they'd be all over what you're doing. Being able to provide a platform that works equally for long-established trad pub megastars and independent writers? That's the holy grail, surely?
On Twitter, the new " Publisher Liaison" rarely retweets any Substack content. When there is a new feature, it's always something that involves the interior/existing writers. I don't see them expanding the reach or making the brand hip. They said that consistent content production would convert free subscribers. I don't see it after 30 months of daily writing.
Your little Substack tick indicates you've had some success on that front, though, at least! I'm currently finding I'm coming in waaaaay below the suggested 5-10% conversion rate.
I'm happy I've had some success, but I am below 365 paid subscribers, which means some days I pay Stripe for the privilege of having an account. I really believed the quality and frequency of my writing would bring me at least 1000 subscribers by the 2 1/2 year mark. At some point either Substack has to want to retain me by supplementing my income, or they have to do something to make the platform more popular. I would make more money as assistant manager at a Dairy Queen
In the beginning, it was because I lost my career, now it's because I'm dying. But I pretty much feel the same way as you if I don't write.
I lovd to write, and I belong to a writing group that meets weekly. I have been working on a historical novel series since 2018, currently halfway through the sequel. It opened in Southwestern Virginia in the last year of the Civil War, and now my protagonist is in Prussia. No hope of finding an agent or publisher, and I am holding off for now on exploring self-publishing options. I would not have been able to sustain this work without my writing group. I write for them.
Having a group is really helpful, agreed. I've essentially treated my online audience as a sort of general focus group. Since switching to Substack I've now also found an amazing group of global writers (as can be seen from all the incredible responses on this topic!).
Writing is an intuitive piece of me, a ritual of 'righting,' a calling that both seduces and screws with my mind. Motivation is supposed to be the reason behind the action. It's served me well in some regards, as memory keeper, value gauge, $ maker--eludes me in other ways. While I've earned a good living applying writing, rhetoric, and reasoning to Gov't & Corp jobs, I was in essence a ghost writer. In the margins I wrote stories, poems, novels, and blog or editoral'ized. I don't do it for $, to acquire followers, or to say 'look at me/my life.' Perhaps in those margins and blank spaces, I do entertain the thought that after I die, someone will care to read about what I knew, questioned, or found fascinating or awful. And it will light a spark in someone, somewhere.
For me, I think most of the important ways I experience the world came through words I’d read. I’d like to do that for others. Be a link in the literary chain of joy. But, I usually need a deadline for motivation. I think I’m an outlier in that I lack the intrinsic drive. For me, I need to know I have a potential reader/audience. Otherwise I have to just imagine I will someday if I work hard enough, but I’m just as prone to imagine I’m fooling myself as I am to mentally picture smiling grandkids.
I was never able to write productively (ie, actually finish projects and get them out into the world) until I started serialising my stuff around 2015. I definitely have that need for external motivation.
Not sure if you’re a Palahniuk fan (his craft book Consider This is best craft book I’ve ever read), but he just posted this on why to write: https://open.substack.com/pub/chuckpalahniuk/p/response-to-cernovich?r=7wj54&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
I'm always 'writing' things in my head, so actually writing them down is my main mode of self expression. Sometimes I forget that writing is fun and need to to remember that, there was a time in college where I realized that. Writing for all the writer's workshops was making me feel insecure and all that (ten page max short stories are so not my thing), but sharing fanfiction online and seeing comments that people liked it reminded me that I enjoyed writing.
Recognition is also something that drives me. I need to know that people read what I write and think something about it, on substack and fanfiction websites comments are like gold to me. 'I want to write this so I can show it to my writer friends' is a common motivator for me.
The characters and the story around the characters. I come up with a concept and until I see it on the page it almost “haunts” me and won’t leave my mind. That’s also how I gauge if a story is worth pursuing. I never just go with a new idea. I wait a few days, sometimes a month and if the idea (not written down) is still very present in my mind then I will run like the wind and tell it!
Unfortunately, every idea I have sticks with me and invades my mind all at once so it becomes hard to focus and finish one thing at a time so at the end of the day nothing gets done. Still working out how to solve that problem.
Yeah, the idea of getting partway through a project and discovering it's not the right one always worries me!
So far, the idea for my next book has always appeared during the writing of the previous one, which has been convenient. But I do have to then sit on it until the current project is done, which can be a challenge. :) The good thing about that is that the new idea percolates in my mind, so that by the time I actually get to it I already know a lot about it.
I used to hop around multiple projects as new ideas came to me, which was fun in the short term but ultimately meant I never finished anything. That was a creatively very unsatisfying time - I'm much happier focusing on one project at a time now.
Whole different ball game if you're under contract and you don't feel like it. Then you write because that's what pays the bills, even though you know an editor might screw with your work later and murder your babies.
I suppose the flipside is that you're under contract and thus getting paid. It's hard to find that balance of control over your work and professional reward.
It is, but it doesn't matter how much you love it sometimes when you're getting paid you REALLY, REALLY don't feel like it. Ironically doing this Substack, which I earn nothing from, is so much fun. Trouble is, I'm all about content really and prosaic things like finding subscribers (clients if you will in old parlance) was what an agent was for and that's how they earnt their 10%. I personally know no professional writers (and I know quite a few) who are anywhere near remotely good at marketing themselves.
It's quite difficult to become professional at something and still maintain that original love for it. Even the best job in the world has its boring bits and drudgery, and if you couple that with it NEEDING to pay your rent/mortgage/food bills and it all suddenly gets a lot more serious...
Agree it's a great question. For me, it also depends on the context.
I guess at its root, writing for me feels like part of my being, part of who I am and how I am able to live more fully and make sense of my thoughts or observations.
I also try to keep the need for money away from my novel writing, rather focusing on the journey and the message vs what sells. I don't think there's anything wrong for going for sales primarily! But as we know, it's also a tough game. So I feel totally free if I write this way. I feel best if I'm able to start my day writing, even if just for a short while.
But then writing is something so powerful to express ideas and make little ripples in the world. I guess I see my Substack like this, and if it makes some money as well to allow me to spend more time doing this, then even better.
Teaching writing is likewise a passion and longtime focus of mine, mainly as a high school teacher but also at university and soon to come in a different format. I think it's so wonderful to help anybody use writing as a powerful tool for themselves or for others. Somehow, I've got to make a living, so that ends up being the core of it, even though it also complements the writing I do myself.
Agreed! That's why I spend so much time writing behind-the-scenes material and exploring and chronicling my writing experiences: just in case it helps someone else. Writing can be seen a solitary thing, but I' benefited so much from the wider writer community over the years that it feels very natural to want to give back to it.
Hi Simon,
I like this question. I suppose I have different reasons for writing depending on what I'm writing.
I'm a pastor and teacher, so I find joy and purpose in helping people grow in their relationship to God by helping them to understand the Bible.
I am writing a novel because I enjoy fleshing out the characters as I set them in conflict with each other - the ins and outs of daily life, the tragedy, the triumphs, the losses and the wins - so that eventually they learn or grow, or sometimes die, but somehow they make their mark and improve their world.
I have written curricula for a bible school, white papers on certain aspects of health, essays on various topics, articles on a myriad subjects, book and movie reviews...
Wow! I guess I've dabbled in a lot of areas of writing, and I keep coming back to the page because something inside me really needs this outlet to communicate with others.
Thank you for encouraging me to think about the question, and for sharing your thoughts about motivation to write.
Cate Covert
Words have power! I think your very varied examples demonstrate that rather neatly. :) Sounds like you have to shift gears a lot - do you find them to be quite different disciplines (eg writing for fiction vs writing a school curriculum) or does it feel like it's coming from a similar place?
That's a very perceptive question.
The fiction I write contains characters in deep need of redemption - some are what our society might call throw-away people. My understanding of the nature of God is that His love is never-failing, though we, His Creation, often fail Him, and get ourselves into deep trouble at times of our own volition. To this extent my fiction is deeply rooted in my faith in Him and in His Word; if we come to Him and believe in Him, He promises to redeem us. That includes loving and guiding us.
With this in mind, it does seem there is a common foundation for my fiction and my Bible teaching, devotional writings, etc.
To try to say all the other forms of my writing comes from somewhere else seems artificial. It is like saying my kitchen is set apart from the rest of my house - that it has a foundation completely separate and unattached. I may enjoy the kitchen more than other rooms in the house, but they are all connected.
Gear-shifting: If anything is different for me, it would be the head space required to write colorful, meaningful characters vs. the discipline it requires to fastidiously examine passages of Scripture in order to accomplish effective exposition.
Thank you for your response. This is an enlightening conversation for me.
Much the same in many ways as how the issues I find important and interesting in life are the ones that infuse my fiction. As a humanist (mostly, more-or-less), the themes in my books can be fairly easily tied to that perspective on life. Part of the fascinating challenge in writing is to write characters who *don't* see the world from that perspective.
Glad you're enjoying the conversation! Substack seems to foster a very high calibre of community interaction, I've found.
I think I was just born to write horror stories. I didn’t write for years and I always come back to it. There are stories that just want to come out.
The need to create can't be denied. I find I go a bit weird if I'm not regularly writing fiction.
My dog got cancer so I wrote my first novella in years (that novella is tangentially related to the experience). Before that, I was making a video game and I needed a story, so I wrote a novel as practice. Right now, I’m writing because it’s an inherently difficult and complex practice and I’m really enjoying trying to figure it out. All the experimentation involved has been fun
I write because it is a creative outlet for me. Like making music. Or comics. If people like my creativity, I am happy. Sure, I would love to make my living doing creative things, but that is an extremely difficult road to travel. And your creativity can start to feel like work. So I see writing as a hobby that earns a little. But not enough to stress about it or chase it full time. I do it for the audience appreciation. The applause/likes/comments. Without an audience, I probably wouldn’t write.
But I would make music regardless of whether I had an audience. So I guess I am a musician who also writes.
Because I want to help other people feel understood.
Same. I’m less happy when I don’t write.
It's an intuitive piece of me, a ritual of 'righting,' a calling that both seduces and screws with my mind. Motivation is supposed to be the reason behind the action. It's served me well in some regards, as memory keeper, value gauge, $ maker--eludes me in other ways. While I've earned a good living applying writing, rhetoric, and reasoning to Gov't & Corp jobs, I may as well have been a ghost writer. In the margins I wrote stories, poems, novels, and blog or editoral'ized. I don't do it for $, to acquire followers, or to say 'look at me/my life.' Perhaps in those margins and blank spaces, I do entertain the thought that after I die, someone will care to read about what I knew, questioned, or found fascinating or awful. And it will light a spark in someone, somewhere.