Saving the Writer’s Soul from Work-for-Hire Hell
What creative ownership really means, writing a sword and sorcery tale I can finally call my own, and how it all went wrong when I wasn’t writing for money
A life of work-for-hire writing will only kill you if you’re good at writing.
The hack keeps a safe and sensible distance, their indifference to the given material, their often-justified contempt for the readership, insulates them from emotional harm. The hack survives because they give nothing, while the good writer makes an unwise investment of the heart.
Whether you write tie-in fiction or the comic-book adventures of household-name superheroes, writing those stories well, in a way that connects with and moves the reader – that is, the buyer – literally takes it out of you.
Good, emotive storytelling demands you look within and find some unique, personal connection to the material, something that brings you joy, whether that’s making younger readers’ laugh, playing with the grimdark of Warhammer, or speaking your mind on the monster/saviour paradox at the heart of Judge Dredd.
In the same way Tim Burton and Christopher Nolan feel very differently about Batman1, you need to offer your own emotional or intellectual angle on a given property, an angle that thrills you and adds something that differs from all that’s come before, coloured by the prism of your own lived experience.
THAT is the Frankenstein zap that can bestow life upon an otherwise soul-dead corporate property. It’s why Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther (2018) is one of my favourite Marvel movies. It feels alive and distinct, heartfelt, less like commercial product, even though it is.
And once you, the writer, have had your fun, exhausted yourself in saying everything you want to say, having brought those borrowed characters to life, you feel them depart the safety of your own head and disappear into the commercial wilderness.
And they take a piece of you with them when they go.
As a hired-gun comic-book scripter and currently-occasional fiction and audio writer, I can say that the possibilities of where your surrogate story-babies will end up varies greatly depending on your profile, your promo, the peeps on your WhatsApp, and whether Lady Fortune will deign to smile on you or punch you in the teeth.
Most publishers reserve their promotional efforts for headline names, they seem to amplify rather than promote. Everyone lower down the pecking order must spend a chunk of their work-day toiling in the toxic mines of social media and risk asbestosis of the brain. Maybe your story will vanish with nary an online mention. Maybe it’ll become a hit. Maybe it’ll make you famous. Maybe it’ll get you cancelled. Maybe you’ll win an award. Maybe you’ll receive royalties. Maybe you’ll keep writing in that vein long enough for those royalties to form reliable income.
But wherever your story ends up, it will never truly belong to you if you’re a writer for hire.
‘Ownership’ is a topic of feverish debate among us work-for-hire comic-book creators, who usually retain zero (or as good as) ownership of whatever we create, something writers of original fiction rarely have to worry about as copyright of their intellectual property is usually a given (until it’s pinched by billionaires to feed gen-AI).
The 1980s saw the rise of the entrepreneurial comic-book creator, led by business-savvy, brand-conscious writers like Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison and later Mark Millar2. These guys were keen to avoid the same fate as Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the legendarily impoverished creators of Superman, comic books’ very first golden goose.
Owning the financial rights to your story can mean potentially lucrative back-end dividends should that comic-book get optioned for movie or TV production, the first step in a story becoming a multi-tentacled franchise like The Walking Dead or The Boys.
I’d say the majority of comic-book creators these days strive to build a career with a popular creator-owned property as their ultimate goal. Back in the 2000s, certainly here in the UK, my fellow creators would generally aim to learn the ropes at 2000 AD (back when they had an always-open submissions window) or Titan, before moving onto the US market with tie-in work at IDW, Dark Horse or Dynamite.
Breaking in at the Big Two, Marvel and DC, was the next step, where you’d stand the best chance of gathering enough of a core fanbase to risk a shot at a creator-owned work that people might actually buy beyond issue #1. The rise of Kickstarter, social media, and the outrage economy continue to provide creators with alternate strategies, though gaining a steady readership and brand-building remains key3.
This career strategy – work the brand until YOU are the brand – would appear to be a sensible model for freelance creators, but it’s still a crapshoot.
The founders of Image Comics – McFarlane, Liefeld, Larsen and co. – made a fortune risking it all to back their own IP, while leaving the door open to their fellow creators. But it feels like everyone’s been chasing that early ‘90s boom-time dream ever since.
For a start, you’ll need an artist who’s willing to work for free for the best part of a year on the promise of a payout that may never happen. And those creators who do score a movie-option are often just paying back what they owe themselves for all those previous years of underpaid gigs, countless unpaid hours lost to brand-building on the socials, and shelling out to attend expensive conventions every year.
It CAN work (fingers crossed), but if you’re calculating projects with a movie-deal in mind, then you’re still writing stories to order. You’re still a hired gun, only this time obeying the dictates of your own commercial enterprise.
Here, ownership means balancing the need to maximise your potential income against working on those projects you feel truly deserve your passion.
Yet ownership encompasses something more, something you can’t commodify, something that goes back to the very reason you began writing in the first place: to figure out who you are, to make sense of yourself and your history, to see your own life’s themes reflected in your characters.
And for the work-for-hire writer that means seeing what you’re saying without the limits of commercial consideration or the filter of someone else’s ideas.
Ownership means owning your own voice, creating a space you can call your own, even if that space is the equivalent of a broke-down shack in the middle of nowhere, a place to speak no truth but your own, to seek communion with those who went before and those who will come after.
As Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo) says of blues music in Coogler’s Sinners (2025), “It’s magic, what we do. It’s sacred… and big.”
When I started out in comics, my original ideas were far from sacred.
I threw them at publishers like confetti. It was part of the entrance fee. You couldn’t get in the door without handing over a few good original ideas first.
I paid that toll with over a dozen Future Shock-type stories (tales of military campaigns on alien worlds waged by Hollywood-style ‘war directors’, an Escape from New York-type piece about a famous author trapped inside an orbiting comic convention turned feral, and rich people downloading themselves into a digital afterlife once they die), Age of the Wolf, (with artist Jon Davis-Hunt), a fantasy trilogy about a world overrun by werewolves, and Dandridge (with Warren Pleece), a paranormal adventure series set in a crumbling ‘spookpunk’ Britain that runs on the ectoplasm of harvested ghosts.
The future of those stories is out of my hands. The publisher owns them outright and I’m cool with that, if a little regretful. I understand it was the cost to entry into a career writing comic-books.
But as the years passed, I found myself getting more protective when it came to pitches. Nope. I’m not ‘wasting’ that idea. It’s too weird, too personal. It’s got too much to say and it doesn’t want anyone else telling it how it needs to be. Besides, I’d need to find the right artist and a high-profile publisher who might actually return my emails. Hey, maybe this needs to be fiction instead! Yeah, right. Like I can afford to take time away from comics…
Over Before Christmas was the first bit of short fiction I’d written for myself in forever. It started out as a simple Substack exercise: ‘write a Christmas ghost story.’ But the tale grew unexpectedly and ended up getting rather personal. I polished it for months after posting and though it will likely never appear in an anthology or be widely read, it’s dear to me for the strange and simple reason that it’s mine.
I followed this up with a fantasy tale, The Jagged Gates, upon invitation by editor, author, publisher and all-round awesome human being Oliver Brackenbury to contribute to his magazine New Edge Sword & Sorcery.
The Jagged Gates taught me some harsh lessons about the differences between writing for hire and writing for myself.
It’s not just the obvious stuff involved in switching from comics to prose. I’m used to that. Writing for oneself demands a different mindset, as well as different nuts-and-bolts techniques to which the work-for-hire pro must adapt.
The idea for the story started with an image that washed up in my head decades ago and ended up as scribble in a notebook: “someone awakes on an empty beach and realises they used to be… something else”.
In the way such fragments have of latching onto other fragments and metabolising into scurrying Thing-like organisms of their own, that image of the beach merged with another scribbled-down idea: What if Queequeg, the growling Polynesian harpooner of Moby Dick, were a sword and sorcery hero?
His outsider status, his tattooed physicality, his talent for stabbing monsters in the face. He seemed such a natural fit. Across what strange seas might he stalk even stranger beasts? What wonders and horrors might await discovery on islands remote from time and space? The idea was evolving into something strange and woozy as a mariner’s mirage, almost alien, like Moorcock’s Corum books, William Hope Hodgson’s Sargasso Sea stories, but with a grounded, hunter’s edge, like something out of Primal or Apocalypto.
I got so excited I did a mood-board…
And a playlist…
Here’s the pitch I ended up with…
A nameless huntress washes up on a strange island in a strange sea with no memory of how she got there. Pursued by pirates who have claimed this island as their own, the woman must remember who she is before she is captured and sacrificed to a malevolent god of the sea.
And here’s the opening scene…
She knelt gasping in the sand, feeling sure she’d outrun them. Another javelin surged out of nowhere, stinging her ear with a devilish whistle and plunging into the sea. She turned and saw them. They had rounded the foot of the crumbling cliffs. She could see all six of them, shadows racing in the dying sunlight, cutlasses clanging at their belts.
She realized she still held the knife she had snatched, its blade smeared with blood. She recognized its owner by his gashed face. He was drawing another javelin from the quiver at his hip.
The woman bolted, strong bare feet gripping the sand, powerful legs aching into a steady, pounding rhythm. She knew—though not quite how—that her best chance of gaining distance on them would be to keep to the hard-packed sand lapped by the surf, a foaming trail that led nowhere she could remember.
Short, chopping breaths, hands slicing either side, knees flashing through torn and sodden skirts. The emptiness in her head seemed to reverberate, moaning like whale-song. Nothing in there but echoes. Where was she even running to? All she could remember was waking on the sand but a short while ago, the tide stroking her feet. She had been staring up at the clouds, shreds of red and gold, trying to grasp her own name.
She had heard coarse voices nearby, the clunk of ale-jugs, then a whoop of laughter announcing the discovery of an intriguing bit of flotsam. She lay there, limp as a landed fish.
Figures hunched over her. Wake up, silverskin. Laughter.
Silverskin? She remembered lifting her hand to study it, hypnotized by the lustre of her grey flesh, moon-tanned to a shimmering hue.
A sudden clamour. Gods, it’s her! I thought I recognized her! But she drowned nine moons ago! How can this be? What’s your name, silverskin?
A slap roused her. I said, what’s your name?
A flicker of outrage as hands moved to grab her. The sight of a belted dagger, well within reach.
She came back to herself, faltering over a long-toothed clam that snapped at her feet. She lost the knife as she fell, crashing into the surf, scattering a gaggle of two-legged crustaceans that hopped and chittered. She swept her hands through the hissing foam, seeking the knife, then tensed. Something was whistling towards her, the sound keen enough for her to read its trajectory.
She spun, snatched something and rolled to her feet, astonished to find a wooden javelin in her hand. The man who threw it froze a short distance away. She could see the astonished expression through the gash in his face.
She remembered the slap. I said, what’s your name?
The javelin struck him in the chest with a boom, knocking him backwards, legs flung high in the air. She stood her ground as the others came into view. They held back, seeing the dead man sprawled ahead of them. She rolled her shoulders, pleased to feel the weight of muscle that moved there. One of them put a horn to their lips and blew a shrill, piping blast in the direction of the jungle.
She had seen some kind of enormous statue looming further down the beach. She sensed safety there, familiarity, somehow knowing that just beyond lay a cove full of rocks and crashing surf. She ran as the sun bled into the emerald sea, swelling the shadows that lurked in the grasses of the inland dunes and the ragged jungle trees beyond…
Read the rest of The Jagged Gates in New Edge Sword & Sorcery #6, available in digital, hardcover and softcover from the NESS webstore.
There’s a lot of debate about plotting vs. ‘pantsing’, whether you write according to a separate synopsis or just write by the seat of your pants and make it up as you go along. To me, it’s a spectrum. Whatever works for you, your mindset and your time-constraints.
Coming from a background in work-for-hire creative writing, tie-in fiction and comic-book properties, outlines are a must. The time-consuming process of pantsing your way through several drafts until the story finds you is for people without deadlines.
I need not only sign-off from the editor/client so they can’t change their mind on the story later on (although it doesn’t always stop them), but also proof of concept for myself, so that I know what I’m proposing stands a good chance of actually working. I don’t want to get halfway through writing the story before realising its premise is shaky, requiring several days of time-consuming repairs before I can get back on the road.
But doesn’t outlining ruin spontaneity?
For me, not at all. Because I still don’t know how the scene will play out until I put pen to paper. While the overall direction of the narrative will likely remain intact, exactly how I hit those beats is still down to the gods. No battle plan survives contact with the main characters, if you’re writing them well.
In The Jagged Gates, my villain, Captain Jaydrid Harrow, morphed mid-writing into a sort of anti-heroine, someone with her own pathology and emotional journey. What if Red Sonja got all the plunder she ever wanted, got old and drunk and twisted, then realised the thing she truly treasured isn’t treasure at all?
Work-for-hire usually means writing within the boundaries of a pre-established property, a world that comes with all manner of branding guidelines, dictates from editors, management, sales, and franchised offspring, aeons of continuity, a catalogue of in-world rules land-mined with revisions, retcons and time-travel paradoxes, ever-susceptible to the tides of online discourse and the whimsy of fans. And there’s often a dearth of concrete reference material to cling to.
The Jagged Gates had no such regulations. It was ground zero, a clean slate. I could really go nuts. Not something I’m used to, and not something I was prepared for.
I threw in all kinds of cool stuff: lobotomised whales whose tears are a powerful narcotic; a giant sword stabbed into the beach by some elder god; spiral hills that were the barnacled shells of immense wandering molluscs; a race of titans whose gigantic bones formed the outlying coral reef, whose immortal blood had infused the waters with all manner of strangeness.
I chased down all these ideas and more as I wrote the first draft, driving myself deeper into a mad conceptual tangle while my word-count went into orbit and vital payday projects were left waiting.
Getting that first draft on the page was rough enough, mainly due to the amount of backstory that required folding into the main story, thanks to our focal character waking up with amnesia on page one.
Even more challenging was the fact that the writing of this story coincided with several months of intense personal issues, the resulting stress and, frankly, underlying terror of which I had to squeeze into a box and somehow forget while I got on with the job in hand. It’s the Great British way, don’t you know. That uncertain focus plus total creative freedom turned out to be a toxic combination.
For me, fiction writing demands greater on-the-job immersion than writing comics.
The formalism of comics, the physical restriction of panels on the page and how much dialogue you can squeeze into a thought-bubble without the letterer having an embolism, means your attention is constantly zooming in and out of the story as you write. You’re zooming into a character’s head to get their dialogue one minute, then zooming back out to get a broader, colder, technical view of how the panels are lining up and whether you’re cramming too much onto the page.
Like writing a haiku or a sonnet, comics-writing is a nifty tango between form and content, between words you’ve just written and images that don’t yet exist.
Fiction-writing requires losing yourself in the deep, without coming up for editorial air until you’ve finished that scene or that draft. And with no artist to think about, all the descriptive heavy-lifting is now down to me.
When writing fiction, I aim for full, engaged sentences, like laying train-tracks, each new sentence influenced by the last. I’ll aim for coherence, always, even when I can feel things coming apart. It doesn’t matter if the rhythm of my syntax falters, if my grammar stumbles, or the beats of a fight scene go down in the wrong order.
When it comes to first drafts, don’t get it right, get it written.4
You can’t sculpt a lovely vase until you’ve drawn clay from the soil. And the first draft is all about generating that clay ready to dump on the potter’s wheel.
I try not to linger and polish. Energy over precision.
Momentum is everything.
But roadblocks abound, minor and major, both types threatening to bushwhack your writing and kill your precious momentum.
A minor roadblock is realising you need to change or add something to the scene (like re-locating to a more dramatic setting, having a character reflect on a previous clue, etc) or else having to figure out technical details (like what kind of armour is this guy wearing exactly, or how do you take apart a Browning M2 .50 Cal Heavy Machine Gun?).
If pausing to fuss over these details means slowing down to do anything more than ten minutes research, then I’ll write a note about what needs doing here. I’ll highlight it yellow, ready to catch the eye of future-me who will do the research and figure things out once the draft is done. Once that note is added, I’ll carry on writing as though that revision had already been implemented.
The first draft is the Mad Max convoy and momentum is the juice, the precious juice, to be protected at all costs.
Major roadblocks are more serious, the impassable chasm that stops you from reaching the other side of the scene or chapter. Oh, shit! The main character I’ve been writing needs to be someone else. Oh, God! This needs to be set in space, not Stratford-Upon-Avon. Oh, for f***’s sake! Where am I even going with this? I’ve lost my way completely.
Major roadblocks force you to take a time-out, figure out whether your story is a complete write-off or whether you can affect repairs enough to get you to the end of that first draft.
Minor roadblocks influence the direction or texture of the scene; major roadblocks threaten the outcome.
I lost my way a lot with The Jagged Gates, as I was sending my heroine down unnecessarily convoluted paths just so I could hit all the required expository beats and see all the cool stuff I wanted to showcase.
My usually rigorous, work-for-hire outlining would have helped me avoid those big roadblocks as it forces me to pay attention to the characters’ arcs, the progress of each beat, and the consistency of my fantasy mechanics (whether tonal or physical). But since I had free reign, I figured I could hold the outline pretty much in my head, which I might have gotten away with if I hadn’t spent so much time grooving with the fairies.
Work-for-hire writing imposes strict word-counts, especially so in comics where you have a usually non-negotiable page-count in which your story must fit. Again, this is where outlining comes in handy. It lets you know how long your story is likely to be and – crucially – how long it’ll take you to write the bastard.
Give me a page-count and a calculator and I can tell you how long it’ll take me to write a comic-script, based on a set of metrics I’ve developed over years of logging and labelling my work-hours.
But when it comes to fiction, I’ve yet to write enough of it to know how long any such future project might take. I’ve written three Judge Anderson novellas, collected as Judge Anderson: Year One (2017), a Warhammer Crime novel, The Wraithbone Phoenix (2022), a Sisters of Battle novella for The Book of Martyrs (2021), and plenty of shorts, including Sharkcop 2: Feeding Frenzy (2015), a parody of ‘80s buddy-cop pictures about a dude who turns into a shark every time he smells blood.
But I forgot to log the hours on a lot of these and almost all of them went berserk in the word-count department, which taints the data and muddies my work-hour budget projections.
This all sounds very cold-blooded and analytical, but as a freelance writer taking time out from my commercial schedule to work – to indulge – on a prose project requires careful consideration. I have to know that I can hit an acceptable work-hours-to-income ratio.
Why aren’t there more working-class voices in fiction? they cry. Because people who are financially secure are usually the only ones who can afford to write it!
As a work-for-hire writer, every hour spent writing for myself feels like a grotesque extravagance. And it certainly didn’t assuage my feelings of guilt when the concept for The Jagged Gates ended up containing so much material that my word-count soared way, way, waaaaaaaay over the limit.
I’d set aside two weeks work-time. That sprawled into three, then four, piling on the stress and an even greater inability to focus. It’s times like this when clarity and certainty fade and the daily task of writing takes on the elastic quality of nightmare, as the gap between you and your deadline shrinks and your story threatens to boil over into the weeks beyond. And all the while, the lunatic in you is screaming that you can’t cut the story short without murdering it.
Maybe writing in third-person limited was forcing me to exhaust every scene more than was needed. Maybe an omniscient PoV might have given me greater agility. I couldn’t tell. I was lost. My inability to focus got so bad that I switched to writing longhand, the solidity of ink on paper helping anchor my concentration. It still went down super-rough and ate up yet more precious hours transferring it to the laptop, but I got there in the end, reaching the terra firma of the between-draft editorial stage.
I was horrified by how much fat I needed to burn, how much psychedelia there was to disperse, cursing myself that all this could have been avoided with tighter outlining.
In my logbook I wrote a note to adhere to while rewriting: “Anything that doesn’t focus on ‘sword’ (action, pace, combat, mythic heroism) or ‘sorcery’ (monsters, weirdness, atmosphere) has to go!”
Having written so much about the sword-and-sorcery genre here on Substack, The Jagged Gates should perhaps feel like some kind of exemplar, a thesis in action. But it isn’t. I had no time and too much going on in my life to set myself guidelines and ground rules.
I just followed the characters, let instinct dictate and everything turned out okay. The finished story feels weirdly innocent, oblivious, bearing no sign of the pain that went into its creation.
As a freelance comic-book guy yet to swear fealty to House Marvel or House DC, I feel like something of a hedge knight, a skilled rover whose bones will end up somewhere in the ditches of comic-book history.
I’m lucky enough to regularly experience the exhilaration of true artistic expression while working on corporate properties, giggling to myself as I come up with a joke or a scare or a secretive twist, getting to play in spectacular worlds, to jam with incredible artists, learning from amazing editors.
But a disconnect still lingers.
Freelancers befriend freelancers while battling in the trenches together. Those friends provide crucial – and for some, life-saving – support, but the publisher that commissions them, the company that hires them, and – most importantly – the readership that reads them, are mostly faceless.
I have barely enough time to write my heart’s desire, let alone spend hours chasing down potential reviewers or contributing yet more kneejerk bullshit to Bluesky.
And so my work-for-hire stories tend to pop like fireworks, a brief and colourful bang followed by a glitter into nothingness.
Did anyone actually read that? Did anyone care as much as I did?
One of the benefits of writing Agent of Weird here on Substack has been seeing reader responses and gaining (hopefully interested) subscribers, coupled with a wider sense of the thriving fandoms that exist in the sphere of sword-and-sorcery fiction and RPGs, fandoms that blossom into projects like New Edge Sword & Sorcery, which itself offers a welcoming and inclusive creative space, alongside every other flavour of S&S anthology, from the traditional, Tales from the Magician’s Skull, to the gnarly and strange, Old Moon Quarterly.
Those subscribers and fellow genre fans offer a sense of closeness, a feeling that there might actually be someone there on the other side of that big black wall.
Ownership of one’s creativity means cleaving to that which you love, and with that comes a greater, perhaps more genuine sense of belonging, community and connection.
And isn’t that the holy grail of any writing? Having people there to read you and not the brand you may represent?
If you’re interested in yet more ramblings about the life of a freelance idiot, I’ve been writing Audit of Weird every Friday over on Substack Notes.
Next month, I’m hoping to delve into the enduring enchantments of John Boorman’s Excalibur (1981).
In the meantime, stay weird.
YOUR NEXT READ…
If this post got you smiling, thinking or ready to create, then please…
Or…
Every drop of reader support helps this project grow!
You can listen to this essay with the read-aloud function on the Substack app, which you can download right here…
Of course, the best, most perceptive Batman movie ever made is The LEGO Batman Movie (Chris McKay, 2017). And, no, I’m not joking.
I wouldn’t put the Great Beard, Alan Moore, in the ‘entrepreneurial’ category as the man’s a law unto himself. A fearless experimentalist, Blakean visionary, mythologist and cosmic comedian, a guiding star. Alan Moore knows the score.
Comics news-sites have been oddly quiet about the fact that manga has been bulldozing US comics off the bookshelves at Forbidden Planet and the like, and the generational impact of that on western comic-book culture is yet to be seen.
A saying usually credited to American humourist James Thurber.
Thanks for this interesting and revealing read, Alec. You never k now ,The Jagged Edge might become a popular story series that develops a cult following and becomes a major Hollywood film long after you are dead.
I am confused as to why you can't just use an original idea more than once. Cram it into an existing IP you write for hire the first time, then later do a more personal version in a creator-owned story. It doesn't seem like that would violate the copyright of whoever you wrote it for originally. If Marvel can get away with having Squadron Supreme appear regularly in their comics that implies that it's okay ro recycle ideas if you tweak them a little (like making the Martian Manhunter a Skrull instead of a Martian in the Squadron Supreme).