Interview #142: How Mariah Kreutter Makes Money Writing
In this interview, Mariah reveals why she chose a boring proofreading job at The New York Times over a glamorous assistant role at Elle.
Mariah Kreutter is an MFA student in fiction at NYU and a writer with bylines in The Drift, The New York Times, and The Baffler. After building a financial cushion working in the New York Times newsroom, she made the conscious choice to pivot from a stable union salary to the student life to focus entirely on her fiction. Today, she navigates the expensive reality of New York by relying on a strict budget and a clear prioritization of her own creative temperament.
In this interview, Mariah reveals how she survives NYC on a student budget by eating like an “ancient Sumerian,” why she gave up on the “parasitic” essay market, and the brutal reality that reporting pays better than fiction, but still not enough to live on. If you want to know how to fund a creative life without compromising your artistic vision (or your bank account), this one is for you.
What you do: I write fiction, essays, criticism, and the occasional reported piece; right now I’m a full-time grad student pursuing an MFA in fiction at NYU. Before that, I worked in the newsroom at The New York Times.
Years writing professionally: 6 years.
Earnings range: $1k–$6k per year.
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Mariah, you mentioned that you have always kept a day job or a stipend rather than diving into full-time freelancing. Is that mostly for financial peace of mind, or do you find that having a separate income stream actually protects your creative energy for fiction?
It’s definitely both. I try to protect my energy and time for my fiction; I’ve been working on a book for the past several years, and once I started grad school I made a conscious choice to focus almost all of my energy on that.
I also realized almost as soon as I started working in journalism that I do not have the skills or temperament to ever be a full-time freelancer. I don’t have a nose for stories, and I’m terrible at pitching: every assigning editor will tell you that you need an actual outline with characters and development and an angle rather than just a topic, and that just isn’t how I think. (If someday I have the stature in the industry to send a two-line email saying “I wanna do 3k on Basque separatism” to the editor of the New Yorker and get an immediate “sounds good, how’s $4 a word?” then I would definitely write more nonfiction. But, uh, I’m not holding my breath.)
I also get a lot more creative fulfilment out of writing fiction or the occasional weird essay than I do from writing, like, a straightforward book review or a trend piece. Again, unless you have immense stature in the industry, writing for a publication usually means producing a competent text-object that fits into the publication’s conventions: it’s not about stylistic idiosyncrasy, formal experimentation, self-expression, or thinking on the page, all of which are the things I truly love about writing. So for me, every potential freelance piece represents a balance between artistic fulfillment and financial upside.