Today I got up late (I have a cold) and sat down to write.
I wrote: a bunch of Tweets, and a series of emails to my subscriber list telling some cool stories as well as extolling the huge benefits of Kyle Trouble’s PRO NICHE SITE course.
(Which you should definitely enrol in, by the way. I’m an affiliate and have $100 off for you until 11.59 EST today).
You see, I can’t help myself—always selling, even here, in what was intended as an edit0rial piece about writing in 2018.
But balancing art with, well, making a living has been a central concern of writers since the beginning of time.
Or at least, since writing began.
As I’ve explained elsewhere, I have a postgrad degree in Creative Writing, and I’ve always been a fairly serious, ‘literary’ sort of chap. I read many of the classics at an early age, and since boyhood I’ve been obsessed with the beauty of the English language, and the power of storytelling.
When I got my act together in my twenties and thirties I started writing seriously, and I completed several novels. None of these have been published yet. Principally because they aren’t very good, but also because the publishing industry is no longer particularly amenable to the kind of fiction I like to write.
And it’s not just me. I have several friends who are hugely talented writers who have failed to get published by traditional houses.
Well, what are you going to do? For me, there was an additional driver. I hated working in a corporate office for a living (which is what I’d been doing right up until 2017). I had to find a way to make money from writing. And if creating the next great English novel wasn’t going to be my way out, then I would have to find something that paid.
What I turned to was the world of blogging, self-publishing, and, just recently, affiliate sales. The latter—selling products for other people through links that you embed in your articles and posts—basically comes down to copywriting.
Copywriting is probably something I should have turned to earlier in my career. Given that I’ve always matched my enthusiasm for writing with an entrepreneurial, or sales-y, bent, it ought to be a perfect fit for me. Perhaps better than journalism, which I also flirted with for a few years.
Copywriting—like journalism—is something that many famous novelists have done in their careers, including Salman Rushdie, Don Delillo, William Gaddis, F Scott Fitzgerald and Fay Weldon, amongst others.
In many cases it probably improved their writing. In particular because copywriting needs to be easy to understand and it needs to be persuasive. You could say the same about prose (Well, it doesn’t need to be easy to understand. But the reality is that most people prefer comprehensible fiction, which is why Ulysses is not a popular beach read.)
Copywriting is also about arousing the emotions of the reader. A good piece of copy will play on the reader’s fears so he feels compelled to take action. Which is a great skill to have, although not necessarily an easy one to acquire.
The more I learn about copywriting—and the more I work on my own—the more fascinating I find it.
BUT . . . Is this what I dreamed about when I sat in my bedroom reading Lamb’s Tales From Shakespeare and fantasising about a literary future?
No, not really.
But we all need to pay the bills.
(Now there’s a hackneyed phrase if ever I heard one. Orwell wouldn’t like it).
The challenge is how to balance this ‘commercial’ writing with the notionally more satisfying, ‘artistic’ stuff.
And the truth is I don’t yet have a particularly worked-through answer, other than to try, as best as I can, to ensure that I’m doing a bit of both each week.
Sure, sometimes I feel as though I’m veering too far into commerciality and away from the literary muse. But then I remind myself that, for one thing, it’s necessary for me to make an income. And for another, I have plenty of time—the rest of my life—to write literary fiction.
The great thing about writing is that there really is no time limit on when you do it.
(Even though Martin Amis has said that most great writers do their best work at around 35).
The other thing is that it is not as though no pleasure can be derived from writing commercial texts. On the contrary, it takes as much creativity to write an advertisement as anything else, and the process can be just as satisfying.
In the end, I have to take a step back and express gratitude that—finally—I have managed to make writing in any form at all central to my income generation.
Sometimes, it feels as though I every single thing I write is part of one long text. And that text will continue to be written, and its narrative will continue to unfold, as long as I am on the planet (and maybe beyond).
Life is so complex, with so many different aspects and avenues, and the only way I have really mastered to try to make sense of it is through writing. And so I continue, day after day, year after year.
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