When you get paid by the word

If you have ever met me in person, you will know I’m an inveterate reader. I read a lot. I read hungrily, anxiously, desperately. I don’t devour words, I devour pages. Curiously, there’s a classic writer I can’t stand, and his name was Jules Verne.

I remember my last Vernacular experience. I picked up his classic 20000 leagues under the water and started reading it. Soon after, I realized I was skipping whole paragraphs. To be precise, I was skipping the paragraphs where a character looked out of a window.

For two hours, a whole army of aquatic creatures escorted the Nautilus. During their games and their leaps, while they competed in beauty, colourfulness, and speed, I distin- guished the green labrum, the Barbary mullet marked with two black stripes, the elytrous goby with rounded caudal fins, which is white with violet blotches on its back, the Japanese scombroid, the admirable mackerel of these seas, with a blue body and silver head, and brilliant azuries whose very name renders otiose any description, striped sparids picked out with black stripes on their caudal fins, zonifer sparids elegantly corseted in their six belts, Au- lostomi, genuine snipefish or oystercatchers some of which reached one metre, Japanese newts, Echidnae muraenae, six-foot long serpents with small bright eyes and huge mouths bristling with teeth, and so on.

Every time someone looked out of a window, Jules Verne wrote endless ichtyological lists for no apparent reason. Hell, I can only discern tuna from bonito because it’s written in the can!

I must admit I didn’t finish the book, bored as I was with it. But later I learnt the reason of all those fish names, all those fishy descriptions. Jules Verne was paid by the word. By the freaking word! Once I read that, I couldn’t help it: I cackled and I felt identified with Jules.

I need four hundred words about the sexual life of schmurfs, stat

We all know life is a bitch, but for a freelance writer life is even bitchier. Since the apparition of job markets like UpWork or Fiverr, it’s been harder than ever. There you will see job offers with ever-increasing complexity and ever-decreasing pay, where people will offer five dollars for a 400 words piece on some topic you have barely ever heard of.

But you know, when push comes to shove you can’t reject those offers. You have to trudge on, writing ten articles a day about topics as diverse as they can be. Oral cancer, mating rituals, the advantages of studying an MBA or why it’s important to know if your feet are pronated or supinated.

So you apply to those job offers and rely on your particular bag of tricks. When you know about the topic and it inflames your imagination, you write it quickly and accurately. If you’ve heard of it — and there’s few things I haven’t heard of — you write whatever comes to your mind with a little fact-checking to be sure you’re not writing bullshit. And if you don’t know jackshit about the topic, you just take an existing article in some other language and translate it on your own words, adding a joke or pop reference here and there. Of course, if someone asks for eight hundred words instead of four hundred, you will be forced to repeat concepts and ideas again and again so you can reach the bare minimum.

And let’s not talk about SEO. I hate SEO because at its worst it’s just a way to fuck up your writing. You’ve got to write with spelling errors just because people have been looking for the wrong term. You’ve got to pad whole sections with inane drivel because Google won’t index anything less than three hundred words and your source material barely reached fifty. And believe me, you will repeat yourself again and again, if only to use new words and expressions so you can try to trick Google into indexing you for more and more keywords and long-tails.

This has consequences. Websites like The Onion will pick up a joke as the headline and spin it again and again until the joke loses all of its effectiveness. There are articles out there where you will get tired of reading the same idea over and over again, texts who will tire you so much that you won’t even think of visiting the same site ever again.

Where’s the fix?

As always, the fix lies in the money. In markets like Upwork, the requisites and the rewards are separated by an abyss. And with such an abyss it’s hard — or plain impossible — to write quality content, content able to turn an occasional reader into a long-time follower.

You don’t need to write clickbaity headlines to achieve more and more pageviews; you need to pay your writers enough. Just so they can afford the time to write the worthwhile content we all deserve.