For most people, writing is not sufficiently lucrative to sustain a living income and supplements other income streams or is net negative.
Also: read "new grub street" by George Gissing, 1891
There's another piece of journalistic writing about erotic Potter fanfic where the article author realises they're possibly good at it and have recruited followers. It's https://www.vice.com/en/article/my-quest-to-become-a-harry-p...
Editing and proofing may be a better deal. My partner did this for over 25 years and rarely exceeded the taxable income threshold.
I do know some successful freelancers but they're the generally fairly well-known exception (and are presumably still not making the kind of money many on this board would consider great).
It never even occurred to me to make it a core part of my identity - it’s just pain and numbness, and they aren’t about to drop off and catch fire, even if it feels like it sometimes.
You don't need to have rich parents. I also make a living as a writer, and I'll say an alternative to having rich parents would be to get a high-paying job for a couple years and just save a little. Just for when the initial pay is a little low.
"If you don't have rich parents, an alternative is to get a high-paying job".
Like holy f**k, can anyone be more out of touch with reality?
Just remember, Jack Antonoff (musician turned music producer for acts like St. Vincent) benefitted from his Dad being a millionaire diet supplement multi-level marketing huckster, Taylor Swift’s Dad was (and still is) a Merrill Lynch high earning banker, Redfoo of LmFAO is the son of Barry Gordy…he’ll, even Annie Clark, aka St. Vincent, is the niece of famous guitarist Tuck Andreas. Tell me with a straight face having those connections isn’t a thumb on the roulette wheel and I’ll politely go away for obvious reasons.
There is also one and only Adele, whose father left when she was two and who had a very modest upbringing.
You can experiment without worrying that you will starve or be homeless if you fail.
Some corners of the arts are full of people like this - some talent, more money, so they get to have "careers" with nothing tangible on the line except loss of face. The family fortune protects them from everything except wilful self-destruction.
The obvious corollary is that failing to have rich, well-connected parents hugely lowers your odds of success, even if you have equivalent talent. Some people still succeed, for all kinds of reasons. But the odds are forever not in your favour.
It's not a binary, it's a significant tilt of the playing field.
But the thing is people always use the extreme outlier as "proof" that something is possible. There is both survival bias and moral rationalisation when it comes from rich people.
Sure enough, such and such poor person who started with nothing and a terrible environment succeeded. But how many like them with comparable merit/talent didn't? And what was the key event that put them on the good trajectory? People always underestimate the importance of luck.
On the other hand, coming from a rich background practically ensures a minimal amount of success. Even if you fail to become good/great you will be able to truck along with very little risk and still access to plenty opportunities.
About 15 years ago, I met some people who had true generational wealth. The brother went into music and the sister into design/art. They currently have a moderate amount of success and the reason is solely the connections/opportunities their parents provided. The work isn't bad per se, but I have met people who are much more talented and never got anywhere near the same type of opportunities. Many (most) have to switch to some sort of boring job to put food on the table. Meanwhile a rich competitor can afford to only work on his stuff until he succeed/make it somehow.
Life is fundamentally unfair and it's not a big deal but I really hate it when people pretend, they "made it" purely on talent/merit/hard work.
"How to get a Mediocre Job and live an Unremarkable Life"
Where the content of the article or video was, simply:
"Be born a human. You'll have a 99.99% chance of succeeding!"
It'd be pretty grim, it'd last about 15s to read or view, so no-one makes that video. Instead, they make videos about becoming pilots at 21, or owning your own house at 23, etc.
It's hard to accept these percentages as real, because it's about the opposite of what is presented on the content farm platforms, and that's partly as I said the fact that the story is too grim, but also the fact that the "unremarkable" people are not the ones producing "content".