I had the pleasure of looking over "writing" jobs this past week. What a privilege. It felt like walking into a vacuum. Queue relatable film image, a desert where the dirt is so dry it's cracked into a kaleidoscope of tiny black veins and it stretches all the way to the horizon. Now overlay that with the watermark of a 90's shopping mall that's been closed for two decades. No one has returned to lease the building, or at least demolish it and put in a Wal-Mart Superstore. A veritable wasteland, if you will.
Which isn't to say it was barren. There was certainly a lot going on. A gratuitous amount. Companies vying for attention over other companies. Each with a program. Each with a carefully selected and edited menu curated for the benefit of their customers. Graphics were pristine. And all the time one is wondering to themselves, at what cost?
the little boys so soberly studious,
the little girls with glazed eyes
looking
up,
the lawns so green, the books so dull,
the life so dying of
thirst.
from ‘The Replacements’ by Charles Bukowski
The cost was, in fact, quite cheap. Very cheap. So cheap that when it came to what was being paid to the writers their portion was almost non-existent. A first warning, when valuations are measured on an increasingly broad scale, flee. Perhaps this is totally off-base. Perhaps one to two cents per word is just what the market desires and is perfectly reasonable for maintaining the ecosystem, but something about that doesn't seem sustainable.
To put a face on it,
1 U.S. Dollar for 100 words
is the same as,
.01 cent for 1 word.
You almost could not pay less without risking what this provider has already implicitly acknowledged as a marketing nightmare. Otherwise, why not advertise your pay per word? It's certainly easier to follow and much more enticing for the writer as a way to anticipate their compensation. But then an agency might be put in the position of acknowledging that to pay less would require them—to extend the valuation another decimal place.
Ugly pig
Burping
In the sidewalk
As surrealistic
Typewriters
Swim exploding by
And bigger marines
Lizard thru the side
Of the gloom
Like water
For this
is the Sea
Of
Reality.
from Book of Blues by Jack Kerouac
To speak again of cost, there is the consideration of content. What to make of that which is produced? It seems hard to believe that in a system of such cheap movement one is not required to spill quickly or risk the inevitable devaluation of their time. There is no incentive to question a word. There is a disincentive from pursuing any type of contemplation that might hamper development of the product. Just a toe over the line, and it is that close, cuts in half an already narrow margin. It's not difficult to find testimony from writers working those margins, as well as on the toll of those necessary volumes.
"What had always been hidden was to him, that day, revealed and it did not matter that, fifteen years later, he sat in an armchair, overlooking a foreign sea, still struggling to find the grace which would allow him to bear that revelation. For the meaning of revelation is that what is revealed is true, and must be borne.”
from Another Country by James Baldwin
The message then can only be this, caution. Don't stop. Accept those opportunities as they come if they are satisfactory and do not damage one's well-being. If that's your bag, go for it. There is certainly a distinction between writing that is designed for utility and that work created with an aesthetic imperative. But the diminishing of one area may foretell a diminishing in the other. Our concern, then, is if culture follows art, on which side of time are we on? Is it that bad, or are we still in the beginning? People rarely ask questions in the beginning. Take care. To quote Tupac, the crime is not how long you get pimped. The crime is how long you let yourself get pimped for.