We all have a future, no matter what

Since I just graduated college, I often have to explain what I’m up to. When I say I’ve decided to pursue a career as a writer, it’s common that someone asks me right away what my parents think.

It’s safe to say that this is not a career for everyone. It can be unconventional, to say the least. Maintaining a successful career as a writer requires an awful lot of self discipline and internal motivation. Most successful, career writers—and by that, I mean people who make their living solely on writing­—don’t do so as a day job. It comes about with contract work, or, as it’s most commonly known, freelancing.

The fact of the matter is, people actually read a lot more than they ever did because most of us have a computer in our pocket, despite questionable declines in newspaper sales. The statistics bemoaning lackluster magazine and print sales made me consider leaving the field, finishing my degree but going into marketing, public relations or technical writing—all things that if you know me, you’d know I would be terrible at.

As it turns out, if a writer is lucky enough to get an article in a magazine like Cosmopolitan, the payoff is around $2 a word. The average for most online publications, according to years of collecting figures, is about $0.50 to $1 a word. When you consider that an average online article is about 1,000 words, that’s not a terrible payday, as it takes a day or two to get those together in a lot of cases. Like most jobs, the hard part is gaining contacts, but in writing it’s also about developing different voices for different pieces and building a solid portfolio.

The more satisfying work, of course, takes a lot longer at these same rates. You might get $2,000 for 250 hours of work. Although it’s still important to work very hard before you have too much to pay for, like any job, success in life has always had a lot more value than a simple paycheck.

One of my favorite writers is the late David Foster Wallace, truly brilliant and endlessly creative. He gave a famous commencement speech called “This is Water” in which he described the value of a liberal arts education as: “How to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default-setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone, day in and day out.”

When I was 20, I read the transcript of this speech for the first time and didn’t think much of it because truthfully, I had no idea what real life was like.

For me, academia was a dream. I was able to be a massive dork and talk about obscure poetry and philosophical essays. I understand what he means more now that I’ve moved across the country by myself for a job. I realized my life was different when I saw the local students heading back to school and I was having a week like any other.

One of my other favorite writers, Geoff Dyer, says this of writing: “When you are lonely, writing can keep you company. It is also a form of self-compensation, a way of making up for things--as opposed to making things up--that did not quite happen.”

In order to stay conscious and alive in adult life, I think it’s important to look at what we did when we were growing up. It’s easy to argue that I’m still growing up, anyway, so I think it’s hard for some to accept that I do have a plan and I know what I’m doing. I’ve been writing since I was six years old and truthfully, I have never actually wanted to do anything else.

There has always a question of whether I’m good enough (it’s really not an easy field to get into), but numerous publications of poetry and fiction as well as unsolicited attention from very accomplished professors gave me enough confidence to try it. I graduated knowing if there was one thing I wanted to do, and one thing I was good at, it was writing. I might not be good enough, though. Young people tend to be wrong about the alleged “real world,” but I know I had to try, big payday or not.

I think my parents worry because they know it’s a questionable career with no typical trajectory, but they know that I work hard and care about that work. Almost everyone I meet in the Valley asks me why I would move to the middle of nowhere for a writing job. Truthfully, it’s more complicated than “taking a chance.”

The West has always symbolized future to me, but in many ways I’m just holding on to my past. I’m remembering myself as a dorky little kid, reading books and thinking “I can do that.” Right now, I’m reading a book called “The Secret History of Wonder Woman” by my favorite historical author, Jill Lepore. I’m learning how she puts things together and thinking that maybe I could do that, too.