For love or money?
Why do we write? As a student, David Kean worked out he was one of the best paid writers in Britain. Now he's simply one of the happiest
I have been one of the best-remunerated writers in Britain.
Here’s how it worked. I was at university. I turned in approximately a third of the essays I was due to produce in a year. They were written with a Spartan economy of words Hemingway would have enjoyed.
I worked out that my pay (because we were paid to be students back then) was £13.30p per word. If I got that today, I’d be living at GoldenEye sipping daiquiris at the shady end of my pool. My editor colleagues tell me that freelance rates have barely shifted from a narrow range of 30-50p a word for two decades or more. If they have, it’s downwards.
These days, I don’t need the motivation of knowing that the taxpayer is forking out handsomely for my thoughts on Cartesian dualism or Rousseau’s social contract.
Erica Jong, author of Fear of Flying, offered the simplest and most compelling reason for why writers write.
The truth is, we write for love.
Only love is able to counter the labour-intensity, the harsh criticism and the solitude that comes with the territory. Writers love writing because it offers them the chance to say what they think, something even many rich people envy. ‘Do it for love and you cannot be stopped,’ Jong advises other writers in a powerful rallying call for the trade.
The act of writing satisfies something very deep within us.
‘When I write, I can shake off all my cares,’ wrote one teenage diarist. Her name was Anne Frank: her cares – the constant fear of being discovered in hiding and death – were not those of the typical teenage diary writer. Nor do many teenage diaries go onto sell 30 million copies. But her words speak to the profundity of the act of writing, whatever impels you to write.
Writing, like any mind-monopolising activity, demands full immersion and total focus – it takes you out of time, into what sports psychologists call ‘The Zone’. Others call it being in ‘flow’. Writing is a way to get into flow. And when you get into flow, you are, according to the psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, being
…completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you're using your skills to the utmost.
Writing is a very effective trigger for three chemicals which regulate our sense of enjoyment and wellbeing:
Serotonin, the feel-good hormone stimulated by novelty and goal achievement, both of which are ever-present in writing. Journal writing for example, has been shown to be beneficial to wellbeing when it focuses on the positives.
Oxytocin (the brain’s ‘love drug’ which promotes feelings of empathy, trust and connection) is stimulated by writing and interacting on social media – and we do a lot of that nowadays.
Dopamine (the chemical of creativity) helps us look forward to things that have yet to occur: it therefore plays to a fundamental need in humans fulfilled by writing, which is to invent new realities or propose potential courses of action which will lead to new and better results.
The act of writing releases chemicals we need to feel alive, motivated, excited, connected, involved and creative. Which explains not only why it often feels so good to write but also why it is so addictive.
Joan Didion (above), a prodigious writer, spoke for many when she said,
I think on paper, too. If it’s not written down, it’s not real. Ordering my thoughts on the page at least makes me feel as if they are logical and coherent. The next task is to find a reader who agrees.
I am definitely nowhere near as well paid a writer as I was at university. But the more I commit to the page, the more I write, the richer I feel. And that is its own reward.
It seems that thousands of other people feel the same way. Writing is becoming the most common means of communicating – texting, messaging, Tweeting, posting, blogging, journaling, emailing are all media of the written word. Which, theoretically, means we are all getting our daily doses of the three chemicals we need to live joyful, fulfilled lives. So keep writing. It does you good and it’s a lot less fattening than chocolate.
Maybe you’ve always dreamed of writing books. Perhaps you have newspaper and magazine articles you’re dying to write. Or a blog. At Forthwrite, our course, ‘You, The Writer’ is about forging an identity in your writing – and then finding a market for it. We also believe that all organisations need a go-to writer on the team and an editor-in-chief. Are you that person? We will work with you on the specific challenges and live projects, focussing both on real content and forging a highly productive writing culture with you at its head.