The $400 Question

On the value of writing about the value of writing.

Feb 14, 2023

While signing up, you may have noticed the $400 “Benefactor” annual subscription tier. If you saw it and balked, you’re not alone. Even though I know better, reflexively it strikes me as excessive, an arbitrary and obscene amount of money, especially for something of such dubious value as a subscription to my humble newsletter. My thinking about the value of (particularly my own) writing was influenced by my brief tenure as a contractor for Study.com, where I wrote “lessons” on an array of topics. In some I took genuine interest; in others, I boasted relative expertise; for each, I was paid seventy dollars, gross. Perhaps a more enterprising writer could have taken this gig and scratched out from it the federal minimum wage, but—for a pathological perfectionist such as myself—the wage was untenable, the writing rendered essentially hobbyistic. Between the research, reading, and writing—followed by agonizing rounds of editing for search engine optimization—I was earning about $3.17 per hour.

This makes a perverse kind of sense. The internet has democratized publishing: virtually anyone can write whatever they want, for just about any audience, at least in principle. The bulk of the written content available online is freely accessible, background costs discreetly exacted from readers in the form of surrendered privacy, moral compromise, or the subtle opportunity cost inherent in our opting out of compensatory publishing models entirely. We bristle to encounter a paywall; once-venerable institutions like The New York Times are reduced to panhandling, enticing us with steep and ruinous discounts: please subscribe, one whole year for just ~~$10~~ $5 $1 per week! If you are like me, rather than being seduced by the deal, you are embarrassed, vaguely offended—who do they think they are?—as you close the window and hop back on the merry-go-round of neverending content.

There are no paid internships for creative writers; a grasp on the craft requires some combination of innate talent, arduous practice, and the financial means with which to pursue a labor of unrequited love. In college, its many merits notwithstanding, we pay others for the pleasure of being read. If we are lucky, which I was, we find readers who engage seriously with our work, who make our investment—if not exactly worthwhile—at least not wholly disastrous. If we are unlucky, we can double down with an MFA, hoping to meet our ideal reader there. We must work out our own salvation, as it were, with fear and trembling.

A general principle emerges: our two cents are not worth much more than the copper they’re stamped on. So, what’s the gag? Is the $400 annual subscription some sort of grifter modern art, a poor man’s NFT? Not at all. In addition to being a sum of money that makes a real difference in my life—about the size of a paycheck after taxes and tips—it’s an homage to a friend who demonstrated to me how I could begin valuing creative labor.

Last summer, I was talking with him about a piece I’d been wanting to write about addiction. It would, I pitched to him, take most of its cues from a senior thesis I had written the year prior about the phenomenology of drug addiction and free will, but I’d write it in my own voice, more literary, unencumbered by the original’s dependence on the occulting technical jargon of academic philosophy.

“You should write it,” he told me. “It sounds like it could be important.”

“I really can’t,” I demurred before reciting the litany of reasons why this was the case. The bulk of my time was divided between work and caring for my six-month-old son. What hours remained of the day I spent on the mundane, ameliorative upkeep of domestic subsistence: cooking dinner, doing dishes, folding laundry. Occasionally fixing some malfunctioning appliance, just in time for the next one to go on the fritz. I didn’t have time to write.

He listened patiently to my tirade without interrupting. When finally I was silent, he asked: “How much money would you need to write the piece? To justify it to yourself, the time you spent researching and writing? Could I pay you to write it?”

We were speaking over the phone, so he didn’t see me blush. I tried to tell him no, that I was just making excuses anyway, that the real reason I hadn’t written the piece was that I was a fundamentally lazy person who was too afraid of failure to take risks, even risks with stakes as toothless as setting pen to paper.

This time, he didn’t wait for me to finish. “Would $400 be enough?”

I felt the same visceral reaction to this dollar amount as if he’d barged into the bathroom while I was shitting: embarrassment, fear, a deep-rooted shame. In reflexive protest, I insisted that he pay me nothing, that it would be money down the drain, that it would herald the end of our friendship, and that I would produce nothing either way. I reminded him that he himself was hardly flush; a year ago he had been unemployed, nearly homeless, and suicidal.

We left it at that. An hour later, an alert on my phone announced that I had received a payment over Venmo for $400.

I was wrong. Not about the piece—I still haven’t written it—but I was wrong about it being money down the drain. $400 was not a MacArthur grant; it was not a sum of money that allowed me to take a sabbatical, rent a cabin, and write a novel. But it was enough to justify to myself an afternoon here, a late night there, hunched over my computer, struggling to transmute a maelstrom of inchoate thoughts into first one coherent sentence, then two.

I believed that someone could value me, invest in me, and for it to somehow mean nothing and lead nowhere. I was mistaken. It lead here; it meant everything.

White Elephant

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