There is a topic that you, as a writer, are extremely passionate and knowledgeable about. You might call that topic your beat; you might call it your expertise or your niche. All writers with a goal of breaking into a specific coverage area or genre have one. We all dream of one day being able to write about those one or two topics all day, every day.
Many of us will get to do that someday — or in my case, perhaps, get back to doing that, if online publications ever get their act together and decide they want to pay for experienced journalists again. I never realized how much of a privilege it is to get to go to work and write about what sets you ablaze — in a good way — until I didn’t have it anymore. Many of us will try to get there. A few of us will be able to consider ourselves very lucky if we do.
We All Must Pay Our Tiresome Dues
As a student reporter at my university, I covered campus life — which meant doing a lot of interviews about clubs and initiatives I’d never heard of and didn’t have much interest in engaging with. But I did the work — and my final year at the paper before graduation, I got to write some offshoot columns I loved. That was the story I’d always been told — that if you survived the difficult years of writing what no one else wanted to, you could write your way into a much more favorable position — and get paid for it, too.
Unfortunately, the publishing landscape — especially when we’re talking specifically about online media — has changed a lot over the last five years, and will continue to do so rapidly. It’s becoming increasingly rare for companies to pay writers to cover one specific beat. And if you’re hoping to be able to do that full-time? I’ve been trying to get back on that wagon for years.
This does not mean you can’t find a way to make it happen for you. It’s just going to be a lot harder than it used to be. Paying your dues used to imply that you could earn your way to your version of success as a writer in a set number of years with hard work and a proven track record of content people liked. It’s absolutely possible, but it’s certainly not going to be like what was achievable before.
Passion Is Fuel, But It’s Not Everything
I’m always hesitant to tell people to write what they’re passionate about without adding that passion is a slow-burning resource. Especially as an aspiring writer, you have to start somewhere. And the most effective way to develop your voice and refine your craft as efficiently as possible is to focus on writing about things that interest and excite you.
But that’s not always enough to get you closer to your career aspirations — especially now, when SEO was a hard enough game to get ahead in before AI made the online publishing landscape somehow even more chaotic and borderline impossible to navigate (ESPECIALLY for beginners). Every expert you ask will tell you something different. Some will say you have to be versatile, capable of writing about anything and everything on a whim. Others will still claim you have to specialize — but do “other” work on the side, ideally meaning writing that pays because it’s what people presumably want to read.
You basically have to figure out a strategy that works for you. That’s difficult advice to swallow. It’s not easy — but you have to decide not only what you want to write about, but how much time and energy you can afford to write about the thing you care about most.
Write What You Have to (So You Can Write What You Want to)
When I first started out as a freelance writer in 2014, I was still finishing up one of my two college degrees. Not long after that, I started working full-time and enrolled in a graduate program. I had big dreams of writing and editing for a living, and they’d come true eventually. But first, I had to spend three very long years writing about things that did not matter to me.
Clients paid me to write about men’s fashion. Skincare. How to make money in industry xyz. I knew next to nothing about most of the topics I had to cover. But that’s what I got paid to do, and as my clients paid me for that work, I built up a portfolio — not just a list of clients and publications, but also writing samples on topics I’d written about on my own that no one paid me for. That, combined with the advanced degree I needed to cover health science and the many connections I made while earning it, eventually earned me my first full-time writing job.
I hated writing about things I didn’t want to write about. But those years of work are the reason I eventually got to turn my passion into a career. I’m very privileged to be able to say I made my writing dreams come true, but I got there because I put in the work. I genuinely hope that whatever your high-interest topics are, you get paid to write about them someday, too.
Meg Dowell Writes 