The trials and tribulations of a freelance writer

This is an extract of the undeniably entertaining, witty and highly intelligent article by American freelance writer Richard Morgan: 'Seven Years As A Freelance Writer, or, How To Make Vitamin Soup'

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"When people say they want to get into freelancing but don't know how to do it, what I tell them is: OK, fine, you don't know how to freelance because you've never done it before, but take something you do know how to do - dating - and just use the same rules. Freelancing is basically just courtship, but the freelancer-editor relationship is nothing more than friends with benefits. The editor likes you because you remind the editor of when she had enthusiasm and appetite and vision, and so you make the editor feel powerful in the way that nostalgia empowers people.

But the editor will never choose you over the publication to which he is married. It will not even be a fleeting thought in the editor's mind. The freelancer can have a lot of fun, but is ultimately the editor's plaything. And any one freelancer is, above all things, unnecessary and replaceable. I always felt like the most fumbling juggling act in the industry.

Freelancing is an adventure the way "Locked Up Abroad" is an adventure. Journalism even at its best is already a fairly caustic and draining experience. All the qualities that make you a great journalist make you a terrible person: gossip, urgency, obsession, noisiness, theatrics and hysterics...Freelancing requires such strict adherence to todayism, to sycophancy, to the grubbiest, lowliest submissions. It is an on-spec life and it is full of what can only be described as insane serendipity (or serendipitous insanity)..."