The Writing Racket

On earning from writing about writing | A short story

Photo by Tianyi Ma on Unsplash

Nigel Periwinkle sat in his apartment in Venice Beach, staring at the laptop screen, trying to come up with another bullshit headline about making it as a writer. The coffee next to him had gone cold three hours ago.

His agent, Jerry, called around noon. "How's the novel coming?"

"It's not," Nigel said.

"Still doing that internet thing?"

"That internet thing paid sixty-eight thousand last month."

Silence on the line. Then Jerry said, "You're kidding me."

"I wish I was." Nigel looked at the latest post he'd written: '10 Ways to Turn Your Words into Cash.' Pure garbage, but the rubes ate it up.

"What exactly are you selling these people?"

"Hope," Nigel said. "Same as you used to sell me."

The whole thing had started two years ago when Nigel was tending bar at The Sidewalk, serving drinks to wannabe screenwriters. He'd been broke, his literary novel sitting untouched on his hard drive. Then he'd noticed how many writing blogs were out there, all of them promising the…