[2-minute read.]

[I first knew J.S. Farr as Deirdre and Tom’s youngest kid, then as a precocious guitar player with flamenco flair, then as a member of Honeyman and the Brothers Farr and other musical incarnations, including his current singer/songwriter project Daguerrotypes. (I loved his recent concert at the mighty Black Sheep Inn in Wakefield, Quebec.) He’s a front-and-centre peace warrior in the Baha’i community, now based in Minnesota with his wife and two little ones. As you’ll soon see, he’s also a superb writer, newly appointed as an Associate Director at a visionary organization called the Center on Modernity in Transition (COMIT). Upon his departure from his previous employer, he offered the following thoughts on the business of writing; I stumbled upon them quite by accident, and he graciously agree to let me reproduce them here. It has been several minutes since I wrote remuneratively, and I found this mini-essay bracing — and a fine read as well. The only thing I added was a title.] 

Writing for pay is a genre of writing where most traditional writing rules don’t apply. The ultimate rule in writing for pay (perhaps the only rule) is to satisfy the person paying you.

Satisfying people is a simple rule, but it’s not an easy rule to follow, because satisfaction is complex. The people paying you for writing usually have their own people they’re trying to satisfy, with their own people they’re trying to satisfy, leading all the way back to The Great River of Satisfaction, where the first writer, still with flippers and gasping for air, crawled out thousands of years ago.

(What makes writers writers is that we know it was a mistake to crawl out of this River, and we also know that everyone is trying to get back there.)

Some people who pay you for writing may also be unreliable narrators of their satisfaction. This is where reading for pleasure will teach you about writing for pay, because a fundamental truth contained in the great books is that people do not know themselves.

The point: to really satisfy the person paying you, you may have to target your writing two degrees of satisfaction beyond them, or write something that goes beyond their expressed criteria for satisfaction.

You’ll usually then have to defend your actions and explain why their short-term dissatisfaction will eventually become long-term satisfaction.

Most critically, you’ll also have to know whether you truly understand the needs of the person paying you deeper than they do. You may instead be caught up in your own lack of self-understanding, or worse, your ego. The last of these is the greatest enemy of your pay, and ultimately your own satisfaction.

Knowing the difference between these two is a matter of character, which you can only cultivate by living with integrity.