Writing by Numbers
Metrics, money and…. making ends meet?
I began 2025 with a post on writing as (not) addiction and ended up writing about the mixed meanings of the word addiction itself. My obsession with others’ obsession with calling everything under the sun (from writing to food to social media) an “addiction” led to a fun linguistic discovery: addiction" is known an auto-antonym, “a word with multiple meanings, one of which is defined as the reverse of one of its other meanings”. Auto-antonyms are sometimes called Janus words, after the Roman god with two faces, the patron of gates and arches.
Janus also gives his name to January. According to Sarah Pruitt, “Believing that Janus symbolically looked backwards into the previous year and ahead into the future, the Romans offered sacrifices to the deity and made promises of good conduct for the coming year.” As we slip into February I find myself glancing back, Janus-like, to the turn of the new year, still wondering about all those resolutions: what it means to tie up the old year and welcome in the new with lists of things we’re giving up and taking on. What it means, in the age of the internet, to do all of this in such a public way. And what it means for writers to take inventory and make plans in a world that promises riches to those who tally and meet targets, but where the professional writing life is still too often a precarious one.
For writers, the compulsion to review the ups and downs of the previous twelve months often comes in the form of lists posted online. We remind each other what we’ve written and published, what we’ve read, the challenges we’ve faced as well as the small or bigger victories. Beyond the ritualistic dimension of tying up the year by highlighting highs and lows, the public nature of these lists makes them part of the much discussed and often lamented “oversharing” culture of our times. Like all social media posts, these lists supposedly say something about who we are as people. Our identities, our personal values – and also our public value.
Oversharing typically refers to the sharing of “personal” information (feelings, relationship dramas, intimate selfies) to a wider public. But among writers and other professionals who rely on an online presence to get work, the sharing of work-related activities highlights the increasingly blurred boundaries between the private and the professional. Whereas a CV was once something you’d update and circulate to potential employers, or for a hiring or a promotions panel, now we see the professional resumé all over the internet – on LinkedIn profiles or linktrees, or in the slightly sexier format of the personal website.
While freelance workers are in theory free from the pressures of the conventional workplace, the annual December round-up followed by the lists of plans for the year ahead reveals just how much we’ve internalised its competitive logic. Like the people imprisoned in Foucault’s panopticon who act as their own security guards, we’ve internalised our own surveillance and self-regulation. Being your own boss not only means getting to take (unpaid) holidays whenever you want. It means replacing the office tyrant with your very our own personal 24/7 disciplinarian.
It’s difficult, not to say professionally disastrous, not to play the self-promotion game when everyone else is playing it, even if it often feels silly, and even if we know that the value of our writing can never be summed up in a set of numbers. So it’s not surprising that the end-of-year round-up is often presented with awkwardness and ambivalence, introduced with caveats: “I don’t’ mean to boast, but…” – “I managed to get all this done in spite of all the hideous things that have happened in the world/to me personally this year” – “I didn’t accomplish everything I set out to do over the past twelve months, but I’m sharing this information to inspire others. Remember failure is a necessary step on the path to success!”
Then comes January, and we enter that temporary parallel universe in which writers and others declare themselves over the pressure to give into metrics. The New Year starts with a slew of posts on taking a break, going slow, wintering…. But like the snow in London, these melt almost instantly into slush, a brief glimpse of magic rather than a serious reckoning with the culture of number crunching that dominates the rest of the year. The person who winters withers away to be replaced by the person who gets things done. Then writes them down and shares them.
Yet for all their championing of productivity, these lists tell us little about the practical work of writing and all it involves, and what is required to sustain it. The numbers typically missing from the lists are the ones preceded by £ or $.
So it was a relief this year to spot some newsletters and Instagram posts with writers sharing not just how much they’d done, but what they had – and hadn’t – been paid for it. About how they’d managed to cobble together a living of sorts out of various writing and writing-related gigs. These are the posts that tell us something not just about the blood sweat and tears of the individual author and their personal challenges, but about the material conditions in which we all work.
There is both a generosity and a militancy in freelancers sharing how they make their money. This information helps other worker-writers get a realistic sense of what is and isn’t possible. But just as importantly, it gives us ideas about what we might do collectively to address the financially untenable situation in which so many writers find themselves.
A few things I’ve learned from these lists: 1) even those who identify as full-time “freelance writers” earn much (often most) of their incomes from work that is writing-related (editing, teaching, coaching, giving workshops and podcasting are some popular ones); 2) in order to write the things they feel passionate about (whether that be fiction or poetry or nuclear physics) many writers must dedicate much of their paid writing time to topics they feel less enthusiastic about; and 3) freelance writing requires constant hustle and still remains widely underpaid (and, in too many cases, unpaid).
The point of sharing this kind of information is not to complain or seek sympathy – nor much less to celebrate the dangerous cliché of the starving artist. It’s to bring to light that which is so often obscured behind all the words and numbers: how one makes money as a freelance worker is never just a matter of individual choice, talent or hard work. It’s an economic and political issue.
Cass Hebron, an environmental activists who runs the newsletter The Green Fix, posted on Instagram in early January that they had “earned net 18,000 euros last year as a full-time freelancer for NGOs, below the Belgian minimum wage by several thousand” – a personally unsustainable situation, and one that highlights the precarious situation of many small nongovernmental organisations as well as those who work for them. Hebron concluded:
An economy that penalises activists, freelancers, artists, cleaners, designers, service industries for not pursuing a corporate career can’t be solved by just working harder or ‘the grind’. It needs a complete reprioritisation of what contributes to a fulfilling sustainable and democratic society.
On a personal level, we can’t ignore the numbers of writing. Writers write to be read, and people can’t read our work if they don’t know about it. We have to share. But there’s a lot more to that list of accomplishments and goals than the numbers game of publications, subscribers and likes. We can’t write if we don’t have the financial support to do so. And if we want to build the kind of “fulfilling sustainable” world that will help all writers thrive, we won’t get there one by one.
Pen in Fist is written by me, Carrie Lou Hamilton. You can find my other writing and projects here (that’s the list, baby!). If you like what you read, please share this post and/or leave me a tip.
Thanks for reading. See you next month.