Six Months of Bad Writing: A Celebration

Back in early May, I started working for a company I won’t name due to a clause in my contract that bars me from saying anything critical about them (though if you’re coming to this blog post via any of my social media accounts it’s not too hard to figure out who they are, so, loophole). My official title is In-House Writer, and in this position, I’m happy to say that I’ve been earning a living wage as a writer for six months now, a claim I once feared I’d never get the chance to make.

And how is that job going for me?

Oof. Buckle up, my friends. It’s a ride.

Let’s start with what the position actually entails. The job is to take existing content, typically web novels out of China, and adapt them as audio stories for a Western audience. The format of these audio stories is kind of like a mix between audiobooks and soap operas, where a single voice over artist serves as narrator, but the story doesn’t have a closed ending like a novel. It’s designed to go on and on and on, for as long as there’s an audience for it.

Sound like a good gig so far? It is! In many ways! But there are a couple of … quirks.

Quirk Number One: The Source Material.

These Eastern web novels we’re adapting? They’re bad. I mean, unreadably bad. The characters are one-dimensional, behaving in ways that no actual human would behave; the plot lines are non-sensical; said non-sensical plot lines begin and are dropped without explanation or resolution; a book will literally change genres, going from family drama to martial arts story to supernatural tale without any rhyme or reason. (There’s also a lot of rape, sexual sadism and general debasement of women that I’ve handled by simply not including it in any of my adaptations.) And my job is to take this steaming wet pile of dog droppings and turn it into something digestible.

Okay. Sure. No problem. Except, there kind of is a problem. Which leads me to …

Quirk Number Two: The Daily Word Count.

We In-House Writers are required to hit a daily word count. The number of words we need to write — in a day — is six thousand words.

I’ve tried to express how preposterous this is by pointing out that Stephen King, one of the most prolific writers in the history of words, averages only one-third of that. But I feel this doesn’t fully illustrate the point. So consider instead that six thousand words a day adds up to thirty thousand words a week. Thirty thousand words a week is one hundred twenty thousand words a month. One hundred twenty thousand words is the average length of a standard novel. That means I’m churning out a novel’s worth of content every month.

Which means I’M WRITING TWELVE NOVELS A YEAR!

How can one be expected to turn these noxious, amateur web novels into something good when faced with such a crushing workload?

The short answer is, we’re not. By asking us to write at such a breakneck pace, the company has sent a clear message that they value quantity over quality. So that’s what I give them. I embrace the fact that I don’t have time to turn these fetid word salads into glorious, aromatic prose, and instead just mash keys until I hit my daily quota. Everything that I produce is a very rushed first draft. It’s bad writing, and I’ve been doing it for six months.

It’s exhausting. My mind is jello. I’m starting to get carpal tunnel from all the typing.

And I was just offered another six month contract.

Did I sign it?

You’re goddamn right I did.

For whatever complaining I do, the fact is I get to write for a living. My worst day doing that is still head and shoulders above my best day doing anything else.

And it’s not all bad! I’m given a lot of latitude to adapt my show how I see fit. Much of the time, I’ll take just the bare bones of a story arc and re-write it in a way that makes sense to me. I even have the occasional day where I look back at what I’ve written and say, “Hey! Some of that wasn’t half bad!”

(And in a rare moment of self-congratulation, I’ll share that it turns out the show I write is doing really well. Audience retention is at a rate that is much higher than most shows on the platform, so that’s good. I mean, I wouldn’t listen to it, but, hey. You do you, loyal listeners.)

So here’s to six months of bad writing! And another toast to six months to come! I intend to ride the wave for as long as I can.