Why I Stopped Writing For Men I Met on the Internet
An incomplete recounting of writing for hire for random dudes
This essay originally appeared in Creation Magazine, Volume 1 (December 2022). I am grateful to Editor in Chief Alexandra Francese for giving this essay a home and for permission to share it here.
“Can you just write that up, hon?” I throw my phone on the table, not caring if it breaks. I’m done. I can’t keep erasing, ignoring big parts of myself for a paycheck. As I ponder what to do next, I remember how I got here.
I am 21. I meet Frank (all names have been changed) on Craigslist. My sister drives me to the public library to meet him because I don’t have my license yet. Frank has an idea for a gory, trippy short and wants help writing it. I type the script in Word on our boxy family PC, feeling grown up, like a real writer. Frank single-handedly directs, edits, and finances his project. In the film, a young woman is murdered and a trite plot twist clumsily revealed by an actor who once appeared in a National Geographic special. It is rejected from every festival he submits to.
I am 23. We are in the halcyon days of SEO. Ben needs someone to provide content for fitness and entertainment websites, and I’m up for the task. A bookish, decidedly nonathletic person, I learn the lingo of lifts and supplements, the differences between the NPC (National Physique Committee) and FAP (Fitness America Pageant). I write gushing fan profiles for a fresh-faced blond pop star. The most lucrative site is a now-forgotten corner of the Internet called Brofessional, where I get paid $50/hour to turn Bros into Pros, whatever that means. Photos of scantily-clad buxom women flood the site, including a particularly gross feature, ‘Who’d U Do?’ I am the Bro behind the curtain, shoveling Taco Bell into my mouth while typing pearls of Bro wisdom.
I am 32. A pair of filmmakers want me to write their script. They are nice. They are dudes. They love Tarantino. They’ve spun up a story where a pregnant woman is violently assaulted, and need someone to write the screenplay. Someone close to me asks if this is really the kind of work I want to do, given the gore, the trauma. I defend the project, thrilled at the opportunity.
I am 34, expecting my first child, when I meet a businessman with wild stories, decades of international escapades and political affairs. As I learn more about him, I realize our values are not aligned, not even a little. He throws money at me to ghostwrite a book on leadership, lots of money. I take it for a while. But he always wants more of my time, my energy. I do not like the words I am generating, do not want to be part of putting them out into the world. After a particularly bad phone call, I take a hiatus. When he reaches out again, I end the arrangement completely. I don’t regret my decision even once.
The men in these stories do not behave badly. They do not commit overt, abhorrent acts. This is a subtler story, a tale of perspective seeping out, spilling everywhere. Who commissions art, whose stories are told? Who shapes what we see represented on page, stage, and screen? Whose gaze, in fact, are we peering through?
It’s not always men perpetuating the patriarchy. A woman hires me to ghostwrite a few of her wildly successful self-published romance novels. They are chaste novellas that feature a plucky heroine marrying a handsome young man, culminating in a (gasp!) kiss at the end of 35,000 torturous words. I repeat the formula over and over, enjoying the substantial paychecks but not the writing process. I willfully ignore history in favor of producing biased, heteronormative drivel. After a few books, we mutually part ways. I think she knows my heart isn’t in it.
I should mention that I’m a white, cis, able-bodied woman. White privilege and socioeconomic privilege allowed me to get the jobs above, to do them in my spare time, and have the benefits of healthcare and a stable paycheck to fall back on. Not every writer has this set of unearned advantages. But many of the people behind the curtain, making decisions about books and films and art, do.
At the executive level, the people in the C-suite at production companies are 92% white and 80% male. Women struggle to find funding for their films, sometimes resorting to desperate tactics like selling a home to see a project come to fruition. In the independent, non-studio film space, there is a $21M gap in funding valuations between men and women.
The outlook is bleaker for women of color, queer people, and disabled people. A recent McKinsey report shows that Black creatives make up less than 6 percent of all writers, directors, and producers despite comprising 13% of the US population.
There are some exciting initiatives working to break the white, male-funded mold. Ava DuVernay’s ARRAYNOW, founded in 2010, works to promote and distribute independent films made by people of color and women from across the globe. Reese Witherspoon’s media company Hello Sunshine centers women both in front of and behind the camera. Mindy Kaling recently launched Mindy’s Book Studio, an Amazon imprint that aims to diversify whose stories are being told, with opportunities to adapt works from page to streaming service.
Is there an inherent conflict in the goals of diversifying storytelling and who is funding the stories being told? Amazon’s executive leadership is almost exclusively white and male. While Jeff Bezos has a net worth of $178 billion, front-line workers struggle to make a livable wage. Hello Sunshine sold in 2021 to a new media venture by the Blackstone Group that’s being led by two white men, Kevin Mayer and Tom Staggs. While the executive leadership of the Hello Sunshine brand still appears to be mostly women and people of color, it remains to be seen whether the Blackstone Group’s involvement will impact the timbre of storytelling in a significant way.
Perhaps the goal should be to make money, no matter where it comes from, a Robinhood-esque take from the rich approach. One could argue that there are parasocial benefits from consuming media that highlights lived experiences different from your own. In fact, there’s even data to back it up. Does it matter that your art benefits a greedy, stingy corporation, if the end benefit is a more compassionate, less biased society? How could an artist parse apart these two extremes, understand which side of the line their work falls on? How do we begin to subvert such a system?
With my freelance assignments, the extra cash was nice, for a while. Eventually, I got tired of churning out content that other people dictated. And then I discovered Lindy West and Jessica Valenti and Roxane Gay and Joey Soloway and R.O. Kwon and Samantha Irby and Glynnis MacNicol. In their work, I found a template for how I could move through the world as a writer without simply parroting back the perspective I had grown up with. The perspective that paid lip service to a generic notion of “equality” while centering white, able-bodied heteronormativity.
Around this time, I also moved to Chicago and completed an intensive conservatory program with my sister and other aspiring writer-performers. My sister and I wrote absurd songs together, making each other laugh until our bellies hurt. I began to take creative risks, sifting through what was my own perspective and what was background noise picked up subconsciously from society.
Although I don’t have an answer on how to achieve systemic change, I’ve figured out an approach I’m comfortable with personally. In this next phase of my artistic life, I’m working only with people I want to work with. By happenstance, not design, they are largely women and non-binary writers, directors, playwrights, actors. They are the people whose stories I crave, the people who have captured my heart.
Since I made my shift, my projects haven’t been profitable1. That happens; there are far more talented writers than me who have yet to sell a novel, see their work produced, and many more who have accomplished these things but have yet to earn a livable wage from them.
I don’t need the money, I tell myself. I should do what makes me happy, and this makes me very happy. Crafting and sharing stories with friends and strangers is what writing has always been about for me, from the fan fiction forums of my youth to finding community in dimly-lit back rooms of theaters as an adult. At what point will this good will run out? When will the prospect of making money from writing become necessary?
Maybe in a few years. Maybe next month. Maybe never. But I know that at the very least, this way of writing and collaborating feels good for my creative soul. It feels like I’m finally, inescapably, being true to my inner writer. I’m starting anew; listening to her voice and seeing where she will take me next.
As I reprint this in 2025, I have earned approximately $0 from my art, but still have no regrets.