“I’M A WRITER” is a phrase so broad it’s almost meaningless. Example:

Eric Kimball is writing. He knows how his story ends and he knows how it begins, but the middle is muddled. His outline so far says “stuff happens” — shorthand for “I’ll figure out what happens here later.”

He stands, sighs and goes for a walk around the block to clear his head.

Kimball, 33, isn’t a novelist or a writer of short stories. He doesn’t fit the stereotype of the lone wolf sitting in a dusty study, banging away at the keys of a laptop or scribbling with a favorite pen, praying the mail will bring checks, not rejection letters. Kimball writes comics.

“I like dialogue, I like well-turned phrases,” he says, “and I don’t like description that much. I’ve never enjoyed the sort of, ‘His hair was like a summer stream.’ I can never get it to work right. I like listening to people talk.” So, Kimball decided not to fight his tin ear for description and let an artist draw his stuff.

Christiana Trenum is writing. She’s pulled out one of the three notebooks she keeps with her, jotting journal entries that will someday become music. The 23-year-old singer-songwriter from Gainesville, Va., wants to go full time with music in the next year and a half, but not necessarily as an artist. “My plan of attack is I will be pitching music to some publishing companies … just selling my material.” Until then, she’s working in marketing while penning her songs.

David Eskola is writing. Coffee cup by his keyboard, stacks of reference books on his desk — Strunk and White, Stedman’s Medical Dictionary, a well-worn thesaurus. By the end of the day, he’ll need to have a speech written for the president of the American Medical Association. That’s a tight deadline, considering the old adage: “It usually takes more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.” So, he types away, hoping to get a draft done before lunch.

So, if you write it, they will come. Good news for linguaphiles who don’t like traditional writing careers laid out in MFA programs — poet, novelist, what have you — but who want to put their word-slinging skills into something a little more in-depth than composing an e-mail.

But you have to pay your bills, too.

“There’s money in comics — but there are very few people with an extremely comfortable career,” says Jason Rodriguez, a local comic writer and editor whose anthology “Postcards: True Stories That Never Happened” scooped two Harvey nominations and one Eisner nomination. Rodriguez and Chris Piers, another D.C. comics scene notable, teach a Writing for Comics workshop at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda, covering both the craft of writing and the business of pitching scripts to publishers.

Rodriguez — who still has a day job, despite spending hours most nights working on his comic projects — explains that most of the money a comic book writer sees is from the extras: selling T-shirts, movie rights and so on. “Just look at the people who work on one book — with ‘Postcards,’ there were 32 people working on that book — and they all get their cut.”

Same with the music biz. When that guidance counselor told you there was no money in your high school band, she wasn’t just commenting on your musical ability.

Jen and Scott Smith of Baltimore-based Naked Blue led a workshop in Alexandria on the craft of song writing — to be successful, they said, a writer has to juggle artistic integrity with commercial appeal, going as far as to track song trends from week to week. They release their own music (up to five albums now), but they supplement their income by producing records for other bands and doing marketing work. “They’re little side things that are in the [music] business but not strumming a guitar,” says Scott Smith. Still, the duo has been remarkably successful by music-world standards: They’ve toured the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany; sold their songs to other musicians; and seen their work appear in film and TV.
Others in the music biz may not be so lucky: according to BMI, a music rights organization, a songwriter may earn only $500 in his lifetime unless he manages to score a top-of-the-charts hit. (More detailed salary information was not available from BMI at the time of publication.)
Speech writing is a bit different, as many here are employed full time. But according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the competition for these jobs, as with any career that welcomes wordsmiths and English majors, is fierce.
David Eskola, 46, got into speech writing after he won a fellowship to study telecommunications policy on Capitol Hill. “I liked it so much I decided to stay,” he said. So, he started doing press work first for Rep. Jim Chapman, D- and then Sen. Dale Bumpers, D-Ark. Both were “very skilled public speakers … was considered one of the best orators in the Senate.” That pushed him in the direction of speech writing, and Eskola finally moved to the American Medical Association in 2001.
Does none of these careers sound appealing? “Being able to just write a sentence in English, to communicate a thought clearly, puts you ahead of 90 percent of the people out there,” says Eskola. Writers can put their pens to work on greeting cards, slogans, blogs, even catalog copy. (Somebody has to describe Skymall’s nose-hair trimmers and automatic tie-rollers, after all, and by all accounts, it’s a fun place to work. “I totally have a ton of our junk, and I love it,” says Joey O’Donnell, who works in the marketing department of the Phoenix, Ariz.-based company. “Where else can you get an upside-down tomato garden or a garden yeti?”)
The money does vary; blogging, for example, isn’t known for paying much (yet), but commercial writing can be very lucrative, with a nationwide median hourly wage of $35.
Of course, plenty write for love, not for cash. Kimball, for example, took Rodriguez and Piers’ class to “get better at what I’m doing.” Kimball’s online comics (Exiern.com, for one) are making “a little bit of extra spending money” through an online donation system. He writes the dialogue, pays a freelance artist to illustrate the pages, and pockets a little more on the side — which he then reinvests in his fledgling business, out of what he says is a sense of duty. “It would be like if you love to go on the water slide, and people came up and said, ‘Here’s some money; go play on the water slide.’ I love it.

“People are reading my comic and people are paying me to make a comic I love. … I feel an obligation to do it as best I can.”

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