Writers: Lance for Hire

Freelance. The word derives from footloose knights willing to defend any castle for a fee, and it still rings romantically. Today’s deskbound journalist dreams of breaking the shackles, telling off the boss, and striking out on his own. He will decide what to write, how to write it and when to write it. Freed from the confines of a newspaper or magazine, he will fulfill the creativity he has so long suppressed as an organization man.

“Sure, I love the freedom to work 18 hours a day,” says Marvin Kitman, who has written some 125 humorous articles for assorted magazines. “And to brood on the one day off I take each month.” Ken Purdy, who turns out 25 pieces a year, both fiction and nonfiction, says, “It’s great not to be responsible to anyone, but then there are those mornings when you wake up at 3 a.m. and know you’ve had the last idea of your life.” “You don’t belong to anyone, and you can ski when you please,” says Brock Brower, who writes about politics and literature with equal facility, “but you’re always haunted by the feeling that you should be working.”

Dwindling Market. “A common mistake many young writers make,” says Emily Jacobson, a Manhattan-based writers’ agent, “is to leave their institutional connections, flushed with success. But with the arduous apprenticeship and the pressure riding on every word, it’s often a total disaster.”

Pressures have risen as the market for freelancers has dwindled. Magazines that used to welcome material—Collier’s, Woman’s Home Companion, American—have gone out of business. Others, like the Saturday Evening Post, have retrenched, taken on contract writers and discouraged freelancers. The more prosperous publications tend to rely on their own staffs and provide them with the resources to do a more thorough job than freelancers would ordinarily be capable of. A staff writer who leaves a publication to escape editing can often end up being edited more heavily than ever. “When I think of a freelance magazine writer,” says Don McKinney, chief articles editor of the Saturday Evening Post, “I think of a guy in his late 30s who can’t write very well. There are just too many other ways for a good writer to make money.”

Freelancers can only agree that the money isn’t as plentiful as it used to be —and therein lies another source of tension. The New York Times Magazine pays $400 per article. Harper’s and Atlantic Monthly pay anywhere from $250 to $750; Esquire offers $1,000 for the average job by the average freelancer. The standard fees of Playboy, Ladies’ Home Journal, McCall’s and Holiday are around $2,000. Even leaving aside special deals with the likes of Svetlana Allilueva and Theodore White, LIFE pays best—anywhere from about $2,500 to $5,000 for what is considered a major article.

Since a freelance writer turns out roughly twelve pieces a year, he makes $20,000 at best—and few come near that. He faces additional insecurities as well. His article may be turned down after he has gone to the trouble of writing it. The New York Times Magazine rejects a full 20% of the articles it commissions. The writer is then paid $150 as compensation—considerably less than he had counted on. Editors may change their minds about a piece for a variety of reasons—or an editor may be changed. When Holiday magazine Editor Don Schanche was replaced last April, all his assignments for articles were cancelled.

A few freelancers have surmounted the difficulties and made a go of it. Ken Purdy’s secret is speed. Allowing himself a maximum of two weeks for a nonfiction piece and only three days for a short story, he is currently working on 16 assignments. He makes from $40,000 to $50,000 a year. Less skillful practitioners resort to ruses. Before he gave up freelancing to become the assistant articles editor of the New York Times Magazine, Gerald Walker used to dream up devices that he called “How to succeed in freelance writing without really writing.” He would interview some 20 children of celebrities, for example, and ask them to tell what their daddies did. He would then string the precocious quotes together and sell them to Good Housekeeping.

Rise of Hyphenates. Freelancers are always on the prowl for ways to supplement their income. The best way, they have found, is to write books. “The good people who used to write for magazines,” says Literary Agent Perry Knowlton, “are in tremendous demand from book publishers. Naturally, they move on.” Despite the fact that he was making $50,000 a year as a magazine freelancer, Ernest Havemann is taking time out for a couple of years to write a textbook on psychology. By writing such books as Madison Avenue, USA, The Schools, and more recently The Lawyers, Martin Mayer has raised his income to more than $50,000 a year. Freelancer A.E. Hotchner has made close to $500,000 from his bestselling Papa Hemingway, and William Manchester has earned at least as much from The Death of a President. Freelancers with a talent for fiction have another escape—and that is television. If they find they can write episodes for a series, they are paid $2,500 to $3,500 for a half-hour script, $4,000 to $6,000 for an hour. A few emerge from this fiercely competitive field as so-called hyphenates. Like Rod Serling or Paul Henning, they become writer-directors or writer-producers and can earn more than $100,000 a year.

Ultimately, the disillusioned freelancer can return to being an organization man. That was the path taken by the Times’s Gerald Walker, and he has no regrets. “During my entire six years of freelancing,” he says, “I thought of almost nothing but money, as most freelancers do. Now I expend about one-fifth the energy as an editor, and I go home at 5:30 and forget about it until the next day.” But in spite of all the hazards, freelancers continue to avoid the temptations of security. At one point when he was feeling “particularly unstable,” Brock Brower applied for a college teaching job. When he was accepted, he told himself: “Oh, to hell with it. I’m not feeling unstable any more.” As a freelancer intending to write books, “you’re always waiting for the big hit,” he explains. “It’s kind of an American dream.”