The other main sticking point in my personal writing-for-free debate is that I don't always consider writing "work."

Sometimes writing just happens.

Sometimes writing is snippets of sentences and specters of ideas that bounce around in my head for several days until there's enough of them I like well enough to start laying down in a .txt file.

Sometimes writing is a personal act of me just needing to express the hell out of myself.

This is when writing for free is not work, it’s about me staying sharp and improving my writing. I'll have an idea, I'll puzzle it out — as I did for this piece — I'll refine it, polish it, and perfect it as much as I can before I pitch it.

Every piece I write has the potential to be a paid piece. I want every piece to be a paid piece, but the messed-up reality is that it just doesn't always work out that way.

When I have an idea for a piece, I write about 75 percent of it before I pitch it. That means I'm already doing 75 percent of the work for free, but my personal process has more to do with my pathological horror of deadlines than anything else. If a piece is accepted on a two or three-sentence pitch, I will be in a dread-panic about getting the piece done until that piece is done, so I'd rather go into the pitch with most of my work already behind me. (Other times, if I can't work enough blood into it to satisfy me, I'll drop it the endeavor completely.)

The pitch process is painful and exhausting. Propelled by the heady rush of finishing a piece you love, you frantically launch yourself into an interminable round-robin game of pitching various editors.

And then you wait. Panting with damp armpits and a fever-bright brain, you wait.

As soon as you write something you truly, fully, madly, love, you want to place it in a happy home. You want it immediately realized in a publication. Or site! Or blog! Or Tumblr! Just some place other than your own hard drive. Some place big. Some place where others will read it and maybe become infected by your fever. Agree with the points you made and make their own points. Have your story spark stories within them. Incite resonance. However, each day that passes with an inbox maintaining a cone of silence on a pitched piece, your happy fever ebbs away and allows doubt to replace it.

Doubt is always lurking within a writer, but it's temporarily beaten back into the darkest recesses of the ego cave when a writer pushes something they love into the warm light of a job well done. When you hear nothing back about that piece that made it joyfully into the light, doubt reaches out. Doubt unwraps pinching, gelid fingers to snatch the piece back and bury it deep within the ego cave, smothering duct tape over all its ideas and thoughts and stories.

When that happens, sometimes the only option to escape the cave with its grasping fingers and silencing duct tape is to write for free. Sometimes after pitch upon pitch has gone unanswered or been politely rejected, I'm left with two options: put it up for free on Grub Report, which has a relatively narrow audience, or get it on another site (also for free) that might have a larger audience.