If Handsome Pay is Soup, Writing Is Fork!

I don’t know if I was born ambitious or expectations led me to. But ever since my early school days, my constant success with studies fuelled people’s expectations from me. With my soaring ranks in the eminently competitive world, everyone around me thought I was born to achieve big things in life. But as fate would have it, three years after shunning the world of science and embracing Arts, I became a writer.

To be honest, I never wanted to become a writer. Yeah, I loved writing but it was only a hobby and a form of expression to me. Never would I have thought of writing for a living but here I am doing exactly that! After my graduation in BMM Journalism, the reality of the media world shocked me. Here I was dreaming of becoming an investigative journalist, but there was never a single job opening for a journalist in any of the channels or publications. The only jobs I could find matching my profile were for content writing. Since it was time to step out into the real world and make actual money, I decided to take the plunge. And that is how I am here today.

I started off my career with a decent pay, the pay scale that most freshers begin at. Gradually, with frequent job switches, I tried to climb up the pay ladder. But along the way, I realised that the ladder wasn’t as long and promising as it was for other more popular and commercial careers. Having seen my sister, cousins and friends take huge pay leaps with every performance appraisal or job change, I realised there wasn’t enough scope for writers. I am not gonna lie; I was always among the better paid ones among my friends from the same field, and I have been fortunate enough to never have had to suffer dire financial instability. But I attribute most of my financial stability to my ethical saving skills and not to what I have always been paid as a writer.

Over the 8 years of my career, I have seen how underestimated writers are when it comes to remuneration. I have seen employers offer as low as 10-20 paise per word to freelancing writers. And a lot of writers actually take up assignments this substandard just to earn a few bucks. With the competition soaring with every passing year, the struggle of finding jobs has become more real than ever. In such a scenario, a lot of writers, especially freelancers, take up highly underpaid jobs and assignments with the hope of gaining experience and earning an income of their own.

I understand each industry has its own pay scale and it is only fair. But the amount of underestimation writers face is downright unfair. As a matter of fact, a lot of employers and even common people believe that writing is synonymous to typing or data entry. In fact, writing is deemed to be a job wherein a person merely hits some keys on the computer and claims an amount for it. As a writer, when I come across such notions, I am deeply pained. The very people who can barely write a paragraph using the right tone, language and vocabulary, judge this profession so much as to devalue it completely.

I have been working as a writer for about 8 years and there hasn’t been a single day I thought writing was easy. Yeah, doing it every day kind of enables you to have a better flow of words, but it definitely isn’t easy or inconsequential. There have been times when I have penned down as many as 1000 words in an hour, and there have also been times when I struggled putting down even a 100 words. It all depends on your frame of mind, the environment you are in, your knowledge about the subject and the resources at your disposal.

Writing is an art and art is never easy. It is, in fact, complicated. But that is the beauty of it, right? Art is supposed to be complicated enough so as to evoke emotions, but at the same time be easy enough to be consumed by anyone and everyone. To secure a balance between simple and complex and be able to strike a chord with the intended audience through mere words is probably the biggest challenge of a writer. When we watch a movie or a TV show, the characters, their relationships and the entire setting is already baked and offered to us for direct consumption. But, with writing, the scenario is far more complicated. Thus, the responsibility entirely lies on a writer to have his/her audience paint the same picture they had in their own mind. And to achieve this through mere words, how can it ever be easy?

Every industry has its own prominence in the living world and I do not mean to undermine any sector. However, in my personal opinion, knowledge can be gained, but skill is natural and in-built. One can study to work in a qualified, commercial sector, but the skill of writing cannot be learnt. Yes, there are several educational degrees and courses to hone one’s writing skills, but the flow of thoughts and ideas comes from within. Writing is creative, and it is gravely unfair to devalue it. The amount of effort and creativity that goes into a piece of writing needs to be identified and respected for a writer literally weaves magic through his/her words.

It is high time that employers and people, in general, realise the worth of writers. We do not merely hit some keys on the keyboard. We do not copy past stuff from elsewhere. We do not write random words. We do not fill blank spaces as data entry. We ideate, create and deliver. We use our imagination to paint a picture in our heads and play with words to convey the exact same picture to our readers. And I can tell from experience that it is not an easy job.

Writing, in fact, is the basis of every form of entertainment that we watch, hear and consume today. While we remain stuck indoors during the lockdown, what do we do to keep ourselves sane and entertained? We consume art! We watch movies, series, videos, games and plenty of entertainment material. And the very first step of their creation is ideation and scripting. The unsung hero behind all these forms of art is the writer. It is always, the writer!

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