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Know how they're paying your bills

A very Friday response to a very bad Medium marketing tweet.
Published onJul 16, 2021
Know how they're paying your bills

Writing can be an incredibly stressful experience in the best of environments. If you’re a professional, the activity is often made infinitely more difficult by the financial instability that plagues the industry, particularly in journalism, because it’s hard to be creative when your basic needs aren’t met. Given the horrific tales of continual abuse, pay-cuts, layoffs, and general misery my friends in the industry tell me, I’m frankly awestruck they manage to produce anything at all.

So when the leading platform for destroying writing careers tweets glib shit like this:

…I’m inclined to answer in kind. Maybe the best advice is to know how your employer pays you. If they’re funded mostly by VCs, with an opaque algorithm-driven payment model and a hand-wavy-at-best monetization plan, it’s probably a scam. If you’re conscious of that fact, maybe you won’t be caught entirely off-guard when the next pivot comes, and thus better able to compartmentalize your existential dread and put words on the page. Or at least that’s how I assume pro writers do it, because honestly, I don’t know any other way I could.

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