Writing for Money or Personal Satisfaction

Posted on: July 11th, 2009 By: Shen-Li

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Although my original desire to write has always been for personal gratification, there was a point in time when I had hoped to gain some financial rewards for my writing. I eventually stumbled across a fairly easy method of earning money for writing by using one of my blogs.

Just by writing an article on my blog and attaching the appropriate text link, I could earn on average $5 per blog post containing a minimum of sixty words. Sounds pretty easy doesn’t it? And indeed it usually is, except for the cases where I am given specific words to incorporate into my post which are grammatically complicated.

Yet, despite the fact that I can write a sixty word piece and earn at least $5 for it, I still prefer to choose my own topics to write about on Helium where I can earn anything between zero to $1. Yes, some of my Helium articles earn me $0 in royalties, and these are articles that I spend considerable time researching and composing. They are also at minimum 400 words long, but usually in the range of about 700 to 1400 words long.

So why on Earth would I prefer to work harder to earn less?

Well I’ve finally come to realise that my desire to write for personal gratification is far greater than my desire to earn money from what I write. Although I am still on the blogger’s role to write paid posts and do write these paid posts on occasion, I find myself looking more eagerly for topics to write about on Helium. I also find myself taking greater pride in the work I produce on Helium compared to the paid blog posts which I almost never look at again after writing them.

When I write on Helium, I look back over my articles and I do on occasion attempt to improve them in the hopes of gaining a better rating. With paid blog posts, there is no challenge and no desire to improve my writing craft. Oh sure the money is easy and nice to have, but there is no satisfaction in what I write.

I guess this is one of those cases where you could say “money isn’t everything”.

Why do you write? Is money or personal satisfaction a stronger motivator?