Do what you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life. Right? Well, maybe not. 

Maybe you went into professional writing through the marketing path, and now you’re feeling bored with content and style guidelines. Maybe you’ve been hustling hard to publish your fiction, and the grind is ruining your enjoyment of storytelling. 

But isn’t it bad to give up on your dreams? Isn’t getting paid to do something the best way to validate your skills? 

Monetizing your passions isn’t all it's cracked up to be. And if your passion for the written word is fading, it’s more important to protect that passion than to put “writer” on your tax returns.

All Work and No Play . . .

Anything you’re trying to do well will involve moments of stress. It doesn’t matter how mindless the hobby or how soothing the activity—we’re psychologically wired to find satisfaction in working toward a goal and achieving it, even after a bit of hard work. 

Sometimes that means getting a little sweaty and uncomfortable while tending to your backyard garden because the larger experience of spending time in nature and caring for your plants outweighs the summer heat. Sometimes that means staring at a puzzle until you go cross-eyed because there simply has to be a piece missing from the box—then you finally find it, and the relief makes you giddy. Watch teenagers play video games, and you’ll see them focus and struggle as much as they laugh and relax. 

But when you attach money to those activities, the cycle of effort and reward changes. There’s a huge difference between a payoff you get from wanting to accomplish something and needing to accomplish something in order to pay your bills. The process becomes fraught, the rewards less fun, and the struggle more worrisome.

That doesn’t mean it’s impossible to enjoy work. But if you’re a career writer, whether that’s in the content writing world, the journalism world, the fiction world, or whatever other avenue allows writers to earn money, those subtle changes can cause an identity crisis. 

But you’ve worked so hard to call yourself a writer! You framed that very first check you earned from someone paying you to write. Aren’t you supposed to be grateful? So many people are trying so hard to write for money, and here you are writing for money and you don’t even like it. What’s wrong with you? 

Nothing to Prove

The answer is that there’s nothing wrong with you. Nothing whatsoever. 

Yes, there are a lot of people who dream of earning money as a writer. But, really, isn’t that true of a lot of professions? And not even just so-called “passion” jobs like your ballerinas and your astronauts—people dream of being doctors, CEOs, and architects. 

Say you have a friend who has owned an adorable bookstore for years. One day she decides to close the shop and try something that isn’t as stressful and pays a bit more money. You wouldn’t think she’d lost herself; you’d recognize that small bookstores don’t exactly rake in cash, you’d be proud of her for how long she kept her doors open, and you’d be happy that she was making a change to improve her life. 

Even if you decide that the “for money” part of “writing for money” isn’t for you anymore, that doesn’t mean you aren’t a writer. In fact, you might find that you’re able to write more than you ever did when you were chasing paychecks. 

If you’re a freelance writer sick of the constant hunt for work, switching to a stable, non-writing job like editing or a full-time content strategy position might free up your writing skills to use for yourself rather than for a client. Maybe you’ll be inspired to keep a blog or newsletter offering advice to early-career writers, giving them feedback from the position of a person who might assign them work one day. If you’re a creative writer, taking a break from the publishing world might bring you back to what you’ve always loved about storytelling in the first place: creating a world that you want to live in, even if no one else comes along. 

Money Isn’t Everything

Creative people place so much importance on money. But here’s the real truth: there is nothing magic that happens to your writing the moment that money changes hands. The novel you worked so hard on doesn’t decay if you don’t immediately try and sell it. Fewer people might read it, but that can shift any time you change your mind about publication. It’ll still be there, and so will the readers. 

The emotional component might feel less fraught for marketing writers than it does for fiction writers and journalists, but it’s always hard to take a skill you’ve worked so hard to make profitable and stop trying to profit from it. 

But that’s OK! The skill is still there, and you still get to be proud of yourself for everything you’ve accomplished. 

Don’t let making money make you miserable. And especially don’t let making money make you hate writing. 

Chelsea Ennen is a writer living in Brooklyn with her husband and her dog. When not writing or reading, she is a fiber and textile artist who sews, knits, crochets, weaves, and spins.