Here, of course, I merely echo the complaints of many before me, who have sneered at hidebound literary magazines in which every other story is written by Joyce Carol Oates or her clone, and all the poems are by Wallace Stevens or Robert Hass or some unholy combination of the two. But however disillusioning my experience with the creative writing establishment was, I have to admit it was good preparation for actually making a living as a writer.

Because the truth is, if you want to get paid as a writer, finding your own voice can be a distraction—even a hindrance. The bulk of writing opportunities that will actually provide you with a living wage are work-for-hire—writing textbook entries, or exam questions, or website content boilerplate. And when you're doing work-for-hire, no one cares about your voice. Or rather, they do care, in that they actively don't want anything to do with it. The point of work-for-hire is to make your voice disappear into the house style.

Mostly that style is flat and factual. ("The enormous growth of world population in the last hundred years has been sparked by advances in medicine and disease prevention, by increases in life expectancy, and by agricultural improvements.") Sometimes, if you're lucky, you might get a gig where you're supposed to be entertaining or silly or punchy—where you're allowed to explain in a study guide that Gone With the Wind is "Not evil-cool like a horror movie or a Slayer album or a big awesome action movie. But evil-evil, as in filled with hate." But even then, you're only as silly as the boss decides you should be—and whatever you say is going to be tinkered with and rejiggered by multiple editors, so that you can't even be sure if it was you who wrote that Gone With the Wind was "evil-evil." I like the line, but can I swear at this point that every part of it is mine? Work-for-hire means not even knowing which bit is your voice when it's shouting at you.

Work with a byline is more individual—but again, only within limits. As with work-for-hire, there's always a house style, and you have to conform. Rutgers University Press cut my joke about Eric Clapton from my forthcoming book on Wonder Woman, and insisted I use "whom" as the objective case of "who," even though I think it sounds archaic and overly formal. Writing for the mainstream press, I've had to dump my paragraph long sentences with the piles of subordinate clauses and the aggressive alliteration. And of course, to write for the Atlantic, you usually need to write about things that the Atlantic is interested in. Sometimes you can get lucky and a mainstream site will let you write about some forgotten gem, but usually the calculus is more straightforward. Nicki Minaj's latest video, yes. But an unknown, gorgeous, random 2002 YA book about kids being turned into manta rays by an evil scientist?