I joined a freelancer platform last year around this time when I was hard up for cash.  I landed the first gig I applied for, didn’t have time to do it well, and eventually decided to focus on other things.  I also got a better paying job, so that helped.  I kept my name and profile up, but I didn’t give the unnamed freelancer platform much attention other than that; I decided that instead of looking for freelance opportunities to earn extra money, I’d simply be better with the money I was making and focus on other projects.  It was a good plan.  It worked well for quite a while, and I made at least minimal progress on my dissertation, while I spent the rest of my free time outside of work watching movies, spending time with friends, and learning the fine art of Italian folk dancing (Fun fact: I am now a performing member of the Erie Italian Dancers).  As the lines in a classic T.S. Eliot poem state, “Indeed there will be time,” and I felt there would be plenty of time, in the future, to explore additional freelancing opportunities.

               Imagine my surprise, then, when a company messaged me on that very freelancing platform a few weeks ago.  I mentioned my passion for writing and the fact that I ran my own blog in my profile.  They wanted to see my blog, ostensibly to discern whether my writing style was what they were looking for (or so my perception told me).  I received positive feedback on the blog content they read and was told that they were a prop money company who wanted to become the foremost resource about movie props on the internet; the man who contacted me said that they had underestimated the importance of good writing for attracting blog readers.  My point of contact asked me if I could write two pillar pages and about fifty articles on different things, props related; most of the topics, they had already come up with on an outline.  They offered me a little over $3,000 to do the job.  Flattered, I signed the contract.  I’ve never written for money (or for publication, honestly), and the fact that I had been contacted to perform this job did marvelous things for my ever-hungry ego, at the time.  Out of curiosity, I did a little research, and I learned that companies must have an established reputation on this freelancing platform—with a history of spending money on the platform—in order to earn the privilege of looking at profiles privately instead of simply submitting a job offer on the platform and waiting for applicants.  This finding bolstered my confidence in the company and the endeavor, and my own personal pride.  I also found the company mentioned in a Wall Street Journal article, so they seemed pretty legit.  I went for it.   I’m getting paid $3,000 to write about movies?  Why would I not do this? I asked myself. 

               The unnamed company provided me with a rough outline of different article topics that they were looking for and a link to a blog that explains the art of pillar-page writing.  I wasn’t much daunted by the prospect of writing articles, because writing has probably always been a weirdly natural process for me (except when I’m stressed and it’s not, but I think that’s just how writing goes, sometimes).  That said, I had no idea how to write a pillar page.  Still, it didn’t seem very hard.  The link that the company sent me explained the concept of pillar pages and claimed, in fact, to be a pillar page, so I used it as an example and tried to emulate it while adding my own flare and simultaneously satisfying the parameters the company provided (they wanted, wait for it, 5,000 words about movie props, and their outline for the pillar page went something like this: Movie props, benefits, people, lifecycle.)  How the individual articles they proposed fit into this vague outline was unclear to me, but I’m a creative person and felt I could make it work; I pride myself, to be honest, in my ability to connect the dots between divergent concepts where other people might not see a connection.  The company wanted me to use a specific book on props, along with heavy additional research and APA style, but the free version of the e-book they provided me was an unhelpful sample, so I spent $40 for an updated kindle edition of the text, figuring the investment would pay off in the end (spoiler alert: it didn’t). 

Because the company’s expectations were a bit contradictory and ambiguous, I perseverated quite a bit over this pillar page, but I felt, after reading a few other movie prop blogs, that I’d found my way in.  Certainly, I could produce writing better than what the company had on their current blog.  I know this because I read it.  I used that fact, and the fact that they found me and asked for my services, as realities to cling to when I was uncertain about my approach.  Though I’m in the “crunch time” phase of my dissertation and I still work 40+ hours a week, I told myself that, yes, I still had time to do this project.  Look at how cool I am, my ego told me.  They found me.  And so I had an entire day off, and I spent it writing this godforsaken, ambiguously imagined pillar page for a company whose outline made no logical sense to me. 

I was nervous when I submitted a sample of my work, but I thought what I did was cute and clever.  I aimed to be more concise than I generally am (because it’s a business-related  internet blog) but still informative (after all, they wanted 5,000 words for this pillar page, which never made much sense to me because that’s about as much writing as you’d find in any given essay in an academic journal, and technical internet writing doesn’t lend itself to essay-length pillar pages, especially based on the pillar page example they gave me).  I had read the rules they gave me for SEO writing, though I never claimed to be skilled in that particular proficiency, and one glance at my blog would indicate to the cursory reader that search engine optimization is not my end goal, as a writer.  Still, I tried, in general, to follow those rules, and to emulate other movie prop websites I found online—to a degree.  Since they wanted so many words, I thought my content could be more thorough, and perhaps more creatively written, though it would still be factual, provide specific lists, and employ key terms.

The feedback I got back, after spending a day on this pillar page, was basically that, despite emulating the example they gave me and applying the principles of SEO writing to my approach, what I wrote was nothing like what they wanted.  Mind you, there was no specific feedback provided.  The person I was working with only remarked that my writing wouldn’t gain the company enough search engine hits, and that I’d have to start from the beginning, as opposed to finishing my first pillar page, moving onto the second, and collecting my first $240.  He then provided me with another sample pillar page, this one very different from the first, and very different from what the company initially asked me to do.  While the company claimed to want 5,000 words per pillar page, this pillar page, instead of embedding links into expository text, was merely a list of links of related concepts.  As if it would help clarify their expectations, the man I was working with then suggested I take a seven-hour course he’d just taken on SEO writing.  Ha!  Cue popular 90s slang.  As if.

I realized, at that moment, while running around the sales floor helping customers at my day job, that writing something this company would find acceptable—if that goal was even possible, given both the contradictory parameters of the project and the divergent examples they provided—was going to be a nightmare of a headache.  I like money—perhaps more than I’d care to admit—but the labor simply wasn’t worth the 3.2k they were offering me, and earning my doctorate was far more important than making a prop money company the leading source of information for movie props on the internet—especially when said company seemed to have no idea what they wanted, and/or seemed to be roping me into a project far bigger and more elaborate than what they were paying me for.  Thankfully, on this freelancing platform, freelancers can end a contract at any time, so I messaged a concise, polite note to the company’s point of contact and then, without waiting for his reply, officially terminated my contract.  I felt immediate relief, as if a proverbial weight had fallen off my shoulders.

Of course, my initial response to this course of events was pure disappointment.  My first paid writing project turned out to be a bit of a disaster—perhaps even a scam.  But the experience was ultimately beneficial.  After all, my gut had always told me that my style of writing was probably not exactly what this company wanted, although it appeared to be what they thought they wanted.  I didn’t follow my gut; my ego and my delight in fattening my bank account clouded my vision, there.  The experience was a friendly reminder to trust my intuition, and to approach projects—whether paid or not—that align with my interests, values, and personal approach to writing.  It was, as a sidenote, also a reminder that manipulating my craft solely for the purpose of being paid wasn’t something I was willing to do.  I hope, someday, to write well enough that perhaps I do make money from the endeavor.  For me, personally, however, that can never be a foremost goal.  Finally, rather than shake my confidence, the experience actually amplified my own faith in my abilities.  Having read the blog that this company runs now, I know that their rejection of my work has absolutely nothing to do with its quality, and even if they were scamming me all along, it’s not a negative reflection on me.  All that glitters is not gold, and if it looks too good to be true, it probably is, and so on, and so forth, etcetera etcetera.

In fact, through the act of ending the contract with this company, I actually came to value the craft of writing more, and to consider how I could make a significant contribution to cultural discourse with my writing, instead of focusing on how I could use my craft to further my own ends and make more money (I’m not a horrible person—really—but I love buying clothes, and this love of fashion sometimes clouds my vision where other things in life, arguably more important things, are concerned).  It also occurred to me, as I was trying to sleep last night and thinking about the situation, that I want to be the type of writer who has a variety of projects going on any given day, but I want to be selective about those projects, and to make sure their relevance resonates with me and what I care about. 

It was at that moment, at one in the morning when I couldn’t sleep, when I realized how important writing is to me.  I sat down and wrote two single-spaced computer pages of one of the many novels I have in mind to work on over time—this one, about all the friends and acquaintances I’ve lost through heroine addiction.  I wrote two pages at one in the morning, but it was the fastest two pages of anything I’d written in a long time, and it felt wonderful.  I confronted my past and discovered that I have a sort of survivor’s guilt over living through my addiction and coming out on the other side (I never did heroine, but alcohol and other drugs were certainly a problem).  I also noticed that, through my words, I was creating an essence, a feeling, and a little world of my own—however dark and disturbing it is, for the world of drug addiction is just that—and I was thrilled that two vaguely conceived pages took such shape, so quickly, when I sat down to write.  There was no planning involved, but with a few revisions, deletions, and decisions, I felt that I’d written the novel’s first chapter.  I was thrilled.  I plan to continue the project, and to be more intentional about having a curated collection of projects that reflect my diversity as a writer at any given moment. 

In sum, then, the experience of being either taken advantage of or scammed completely (I still can’t tell exactly what was going on there) only invigorated me more.  My writing is a part of me, and I’ll trust both logic and intuition when deciding how I divide my time as a writer.  Maybe I’ll be a novelist or an essayist someday.  Maybe I’ll write primarily academic things.  Maybe my “legacy,” as a writer, will be nothing more than the entries you read on this relatively obscure blog.  I will let time, effort, luck, and fate dictate those decisions.  Regardless of the outcome, I will try to write for the good of many, while, at the same time, following the sage maxim: “To thine own self be true.”