Many freelancers get paid per hour, or per day. Some have standard rates for typical tasks.

Journalism is rarely typical. And usually, we’re paid per word.

I’ve had many friends whose first thought is how easy that must be to exploit. Often they remember a story about a writer like Charles Dickens or Victor Hugo padding their books with digressions to up their pay. Those stories probably didn’t happen, and these days, that method is even less likely to work. When I pitch a piece, the editor and I agree beforehand on a target word count. The only way I get paid more than expected is if the editor agrees that it makes sense.

That said, there definitely are ways to exploit being paid by the word, if you wanted to. They’re just more subtle.

The source of any such exploit is to notice that writing is not actually the hard part of journalism. Research is time-consuming: the more people you talk to, the longer it takes. Writing, once you’re used to it, can go quite quickly. So the length of a piece itself doesn’t determine how much work it takes to write: research does.

In principle, longer pieces are supposed to take more research. Editors will have rough expectations for the number of sources you’ll interview, so this isn’t something you can skimp on, per se. And publications known for their high standards for research usually pay larger rates per-word.

But no matter how much you’re paid, research can go out of hand in the other direction. Journalism is about finding out the truth, and sometimes the truth is more complicated than expected. Sometimes you need more information, and need to fit in one more interview, then another, or run around chasing after missing info. Then you need to figure out how to fit it all into the same word count you started with.

So suppose you’re a freelancer who aspires to consistently pay their bills. You want to earn a certain amount per hour worked, but some projects can take much more work than others. So what do you do?

You look for the simple. You try to find stories that are unlikely to be complicated, that won’t have clashes of opinion that need to be represented or experts with different sides of the story. If you don’t find such a story, you simplify: you write a piece that makes the story sound cohesive, that papers over doubt, even if you’ve run into doubts yourself while writing it. If you’re consistent about it, you can do what your friends with salaries do, and earn a stable living.

Not the kind of exploit you had in mind, I suspect. And not, despite the sound of it, something you can do reliably. I find I’m always tempted by complexity, always drawn to investigate a story that’s a bit too big for the wordcount it’s supposed to fit.

But it is an ever-present incentive, one I suspect people with a larger roster of leads start to feel. If you’re paid by the word, then the best story tends to be a tidy one.