Joyful Amateurity

The Pleasure of Doing Things Poorly and for Free

People write for all kinds of reasons. Writers have all kinds of goals. Some of us have burning stories we want to impart to paper. Some of us want to be read. Some of us want to earn a living or even a fortune from writing. Some of us have a Shelf Life deadline tomorrow at 9 o’clock in the morning. Some of these reasons overlap. There’s a wide world of reasons why people undertake creative endeavors.

All the reasons are valid and legitimate; none are more or less, better or worse, than any other.

Today’s Shelf Life is what to do with writing that doesn’t publish, sell, or find readership; and also how to deal with your emotions about same.

First of all, everyone should acknowledge that not all writing will sell. Not every manuscript sells. Not every completed story finds an outlet. When I say “sell” I’m using it to mean a number of things including “selling units for money” but also “finding a readership, paying or otherwise” and “achieving a meaningful publication.” All of those things mean different things to different people.

“Meaningful publication,” for instance. To one person, self-publishing may not be an avenue of publication that is meaningful to them—go trad or don’t go at all. Another person may be comfortable with self-publishing as long as they know their title is available in brick-and-mortar buildings like bookstores and libraries. A third person may feel their book is meaningfully published once it has been released publicly on Amazon Kindle. 

Whether a book is published traditionally (by a trad publisher) or self-published, whether it is made available at many retailers or at one, and whether it is available in physical form or only as a digital download—none of these things guarantee that 

1. The writer has made or will make any money from the book; and 

2. That anyone will read the book.

Lots of books are published but never make money. Lots of books are published but do not find readers. Splitting the hair further, some books are published, and find readers, but never make money: For instance, books made available for free on Kindle, or on a platform like Wattpad or AO3. Even traditionally published books, with editorial, marketing, and sales teams behind them, don’t always make money for the author. The only guarantee is whatever advance is negotiated contractually. Books can be published and then not sell. 

So: Amateur has a couple of important meanings in the context of this article. One of them is, a person who does a particular activity poorly. The other is, a person who does a particular activity on an unpaid rather than professional basis. A good way to visualize this difference is using football. When I play football, I do it as an amateur: I do not know the rules, my physical fitness level is poor, I cannot throw a football very far, and don’t even get me started about running. An NCAA Division I college football player in their final season also plays as an amateur: They play football well—better than 99.9 percent of the people on the planet—but they do it on an unpaid basis.

(I realize that college sportsball players can now endorse products for money and that they receive scholarships that cover their tuition, but they do not receive a salary for playing football.)

Another good example is that I was an amateur roller derby player. Although I played in bouts that fans paid to attend, I myself was not paid for my participation in the sport and also I played it very poorly.

When I thought about taking joy in being “an amateur writer,” I was thinking about both things: Taking joy in writing poorly, and taking joy in writing unpaid. Probably both of those things sound like the very opposite of joyful, but hear me out.

Someone said to me once, about their finished manuscript, in essence: “If I don’t make it work for me, then the work I put into it is wasted.” What they meant was, they had spent their valuable time writing the manuscript (their first manuscript, by the way) and they felt that if they did not sell that manuscript to a publisher—or otherwise receive financial remuneration for their effort, perhaps through self-publishing—then the time spent on it would have been wasted. That time, it follows, could have been spent doing something else that would have created income. For instance, putting in overtime hours at their day job, or driving an Uber, or knitting scarves to sell on Etsy.

This is not an unreasonable thing to believe if you are living in a late-stage capitalist hellhole in which the ability to earn income is seen as a virtue. Time spent creating something that will not earn money is wasted time. Emphasis on creating because I think, or hope, that most of us do not see time spent with loved ones or practicing self-care activities is wasted. Obviously it isn’t. But when you spend your time creating something, shouldn’t the thing you have created go on to fulfill its purpose? Should a dress you sew be worn? Shouldn’t a sourdough loaf you bake be eaten? Shouldn’t a creature you cobble together from old body parts and chemicals and animate with a mysterious spark kill your bride? 

This makes me question: What is a manuscript for? That is, what is its inherent purpose? You can sell a dress you sewed or a loaf of bread you make so that another person can wear it or eat it (respectively), but the ultimate purpose of those objects is to be worn and eaten. Bread doesn’t exist to be sold. It exists to nourish. People make things for sale all the time; things they don’t need to use themself. People bake bread they don’t intend to eat so they can sell it and make money. That doesn’t take any virtue away from the bread or change its inherent purpose.

Likewise, a manuscript doesn’t exist to be sold. That might be why you made it or what you intend to do with it, but that’s not the purpose for which a manuscript exists. A manuscript is a vehicle that takes meaning or knowledge—in the form of a story to entertain or materials to educate, usually—from inside the writer’s brain to outside the writer’s brain, where it may be consumed by readers.

Next I would ask: For what purpose was it written? Did the writer sit down at a computer and decide to create text for the purpose of earning money? Did the writer sit down to earn money and tell a story incidentally during the money-earning process? Or did the writer sit down at a computer to tell a story and hope, perhaps, to earn some money as proceeds of the storytelling process?

I know plenty of people who write for a living, both people who write manuscripts and sell them to earn a living and people who have W2 jobs doing writing to earn a salary, which is often not the kind of “writing for a living” people mean when they say they want “to write for a living” but which is, nonetheless, a valid way of earning money from writing (and probably more common than earning money selling stories or novels). There’s nothing wrong with writing for the purpose of earning money. Just like there’s nothing wrong with baking bread for the purpose of selling it and earning money. Baking is a noble occupation.

Plenty of people also take a creative endeavor they’re passionate about and turn that into their profession. I’m sure there are many bakers who began baking for the love of baking and then began to sell product and became professional bakers. I know people who have done this with all kinds of things.

When you begin to do something—anything—you will not be an expert at it. Your efforts may not be comparable to those of a professional. This is very normal. Nobody comes out of the womb knowing how to bake bread or write a novel. These things must be learned and then practiced. And practiced some more. And some more.

This is where the other definition of “amateur” comes into play—that an amateur is someone who does something poorly. “An amateurish effort.” Everything a person does will be done amateurishly before it is done professionally—in the sense of quality level. The amateur efforts come before the apprentice efforts, which come before the journeyman efforts, which come before the masterpiece.

I think what I am getting at in a roundabout way is that whenever someone begins writing—when they first make a serious effort at written storytelling, for instance—it’s likely they are doing it amateurishly as in poorly and amateurishly as in not for pay. The first effort is unlikely to be a masterpiece or a million-seller. This doesn’t mean that the manuscripts that come out of those early efforts failed in some way. They’re just the early efforts.

You don’t usually make your masterpiece first and then make worse and worse work as you gain experience until your last efforts are the worst of all, unless you are M Night Shyamalan, who is somehow Benjamin Buttoning his directorial career. Usually the better work comes later, with practice and experience.

If an early effort doesn’t find as many readers as hoped, or sell to a traditional publisher, or sell into bookstores and libraries, or earn money—that doesn’t mean that manuscript or the writer has failed. It may just mean that work isn’t ready for those things; the next one may be.

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