E-Mail This Article to a Friend Word imperfect The perils of maximizing your communicational dollar BY CHRIS WRIGHT

A while back, I landed a freelance writing job that paid $2 a word. Eight quarters an adjective. Twenty dimes a verb. Forty nickels a gerund. In theory, this is a lot of money. In practice, it’s a bloody ridiculous amount. How ridiculous? Well, at these rates, "It’s a bloody ridiculous amount" would pay 10 bucks. As I sat down to write, my mind swam with the possibilities this new world opened up to me: yachts, limousines, food. To be honest, I didn’t get much work done that day. What with hitting the "word count" button and rubbing my hands together, I didn’t really have time.

That night, I sat in a bar formulating $10 sentences in my head: "Hello, how are you today?" "Buses are bigger than cars." "Ging-gang goolie-goolie-goolie." That last one’s not even a real sentence. Ten bucks! It got better. As I ordered a beer — "A Newcastle, please" — it occurred to me that at two bucks per, those words would pay for themselves. If I stretched the order out a bit — "Good evening, barkeep, I’d like a pint of ... um, ah ... Newcastle Brown Ale, if you would be so kind" — I’d set myself up with beer for the whole night. And if I could include a brief description of the town of Newcastle ... Would I get paid for ums and ahs? I made a mental note to contact my editor.

The $2-a-word thing did have its drawbacks. I noticed, for instance, a distinct drop in the quality of my e-mails. An incorrigible e-babbler, I could now barely bring myself to tap out a cursory "Hi." It got to the point where my friends — convinced I was snubbing them — stopped e-mailing me altogether. But I couldn’t help myself. Anything more ambitious than a "Nope" seemed like a waste of words, and therefore a waste of money. I couldn’t even do the crossword without sighing at the utter futility of it all. Within days of becoming a journalistic high roller, I’d been thoroughly corrupted. Trumpified. How’s that for a two-bucker?

Things only got worse when I started writing the article in earnest. Suddenly, the phrase "economy of language" took on a perverse new meaning. Indeed, if my e-mails had gotten terse to the point of insult, my freelance work threatened to adopt a wordiness unseen since Mary Shelley was in her prime. "Recently," I’d write, "that is, not so very long ago ..." My prose was stuck in a synonymical quagmire, bogged down in a reiterative morass. It was more than awful; it was deplorable.

Desperate, I turned to the master of pith: Ernest Hemingway. "My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel," Hemingway once wrote, "in the best and simplest way." Easy for him to say — he was being paid by the book. Of course he wanted to bang that stuff out. At $2 a word, I think even Ernest would have been bitten. Anyone would. "To be, or not to be: that is the question. ‘To be what?’ you may ask, but that is another question. Suffice it to say, by ‘be,’ I mean ‘live,’ because, frankly, I’m a bit depressed right now, and I’m thinking about, you know, maybe ending it all." After all, in Shakespeare’s day, two bucks would get you a very nice doublet, with enough left over for a season ticket at the Rose.

But then, I wasn’t being asked to create a great work of literature. I wasn’t even being asked to create a crappy work of literature. I was being asked to write 250 words on a local bar. Which isn’t as easy as it sounds. As it turns out, when you’re being paid this kind of money, people want you to be very picky with your words — "Ging-gang goolie-goolie-goolie" just isn’t going to cut it. I began to get performance anxiety. I was like a zitty teen on a first date — a little too eager to please. The harder I tried, the more limp my prose became. I must have deleted $10,000 worth of words that day — most of them the word "the."

But all was not lost. For one thing, I learned a lot from this experience. Words and money, I now know, are like oil and vinegar: great over a green salad, but terrible when spilled into your lap. No, that’s not it. What I’ve learned is this: to equate writing with commerce is to diminish the true value of words. The fact is, what we put down on the page has nothing to do with what we put into our wallets. As soon as I realized this, I was able to complete the piece with little difficulty. I think it turned out okay. And even if okay isn’t good enough, if I never hear from those deep-pocketed editors again, I’m thankful to have been given the chance to learn this lesson.

Since I wrote that freelance article, I’ve been thinking about getting into poetry again. I have a few sestinas in mind, a villanelle or two. Perhaps I’ll even try my hand at the metrical romance, followed by a Homeric epic. This, I figure, will help me to remember why I started writing in the first place, to re-ignite my love affair with the written word. Naturally, I’ll be staying away from the haiku. After all, with its rigid structural constraints — three lines, 17 syllables — this ancient Japanese form, in terms of earning potential, will always be a complete dog.

If you’re paying by the word, Chris Wright can be reached at ... well ... um ... maybe ... probably ... cwright[a]phx.com