Occupational Hazards to being a Full-Time Writer
Every now and again I think to myself how nice it would be to give up my staid life as a Software Developer and start an exciting new career as a Novelist.
But then I think to myself that there are surely drawbacks to that path and that I shouldn't leap too boldly into that unknown territory.
So, to assist me in making an important decision like this, I ask you: what are the occupational hazards to being a full-time writer?
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/37334. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
3 answers
Loneliness: Writing is primarily a solitary activity. Many software developers are introverts already, so lots of solitude and isolation may not bother you, but for me, as a social person, it's one of the main barriers to happiness as a writer.
Disconnection From Reality: You're going to be spending an awful lot of time inside your own head, and as a result, you might find an already tenuous connection to reality starting to weaken.
Poverty: Most novelists, with some key exceptions, don't do particularly well financially. It would take several "reasonably successful" novels or one particularly successful bestseller per year to equal the income of an average software developer. And that's not counting the lag time before publication, which can be years. (There do exist less glamorous, more reliable writing career paths, but you're not really asking about those.)
Lack of Structure: Being a writer means being your own boss, and while that may sound good, lack of structure may bring you down unless you're incredibly self disciplined. When I was much younger, I quit my job to write full time at one point, and ended up producing far less writing than I do now, holding down a fulltime job (as a software developer).
Rejection: Even good and famous authors have to deal with a huge amount of rejection and it can be truly soul-crushing (there's an excellent non-fiction chronicle of this called Mortification, including, if I recall correctly, Handmaiden Tale's author Margaret Atwood's sad story of being booked to do an unsuccessful book signing in the lingerie department of a local store). You have to have an ego of steel to withstand it and keep on going...
My advice would be to do what I'm doing --keep your job as a software developer, but commit to writing an hour or so every single day. (I've actually encountered a huge number of other developers using their day job to subsidize a second career in the arts --probably because it's one of the few truly lucrative day jobs that has any creativity attached to it.)
If you write that bestseller, you can always quit then...
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/37383. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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If I were a rich man, all day long I'd sit and write.
To elaborate:
- What do you eat while you're writing your first novel?
- Did you manage to get your first novel published?
- What do you eat until the novel gets published?
- Once the novel has been published and you're seeing some money from it, how long does it feed you? Does it feed you for enough time to write your next novel?
To eat, you need a steady inflow of cash. To have a steady inflow of cash, you would need at least one book, more likely - several books, already out there. Or you need to have enough cash already, that you don't need to care about having an inflow.
There are in-between possibilities: you might find employment as a journalist or a translator - jobs that would improve your writing skills, and thus get you closer to eventually striking out on your own (once you have something published). But those jobs wouldn't pay half as well as being a software developer. So you've got to be prepared for that.
You've got to remember that stories like J.K. Rowling's are extremely rare. Most starting novelists would be fitting the Starving Artist trope if they didn't have some other means of supporting themselves, and many never get their "breakthrough" at all.
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I will presume you mean that you can write and get paid for it, and could actually choose a life as a professional writer, without starving.
If that is the case (and this answer is tailored to your situation) your problems are quite similar to the problems of a free-lance "gig" programmer; a technical contractor. I have done that job. Or a self-employed programmer, I am aware of a few that write cheap phone apps (99 cents or $1.99) and were actually making a living doing that.
The problem with self-employment are getting gigs, money and time management. All are conquerable.
Time Management.
Trivial work expands to fill the time available. It's a law of nature. With a job and a boss, you don't have a choice but to show up nearly every day, and spend the day doing your damn job. You are compelled to be productive. Even if you love writing, it is extremely easy, when stuck, to turn on the TV and see what's happening in the world, or catch up on the laundry, or go ahead and put away the dishes. Or surf the net. A regular job has external drivers, people checking on your progress, people that need things, mandatory meetings and presentations.
All of that vanishing in a white mist is exactly what you want, but we quickly become accustomed to new and better things, and soon your enthusiasm fades. Part of your enthusiasm for writing all day was precisely the lifting of these imposed pains and strenuous work to meet unreasonable or irrational productivity demands, but six months in --- That is no longer motivating you. You have become used to that, and don't want to go back --- but you are also getting used to starting late and quitting early and taking two hours for lunch, and calling the rest your "thinking" time. If you want to be self-employed, take your job ethic and apply it from the start and do not waver. Get used to the lack of pain and external demands, do not get used to the freedom; treat it like a job.
That is, more or less, the advice of Orson Scott Card: Set your writing hours like a job, and during that time, sit and stare at the empty page or type. Your choice, but no other choice. Do nothing at all, or write. You can do research but don't surf or read for entertainment. Train by reading a book or blog on writing, fine. But make no "writing" excuse to read about the top ten celebrity cheaters, stick to the real job of writing.
Money Management.
For any self-employed start up, being stingy with money and expenses and as frugal as possible with credit is a survival skill. Stephen King counts 1500 of hours of writing to finish a novel; that is 9 months of full time work. (Less for him, he writes literally every day, weekends, birthdays and holidays included). He also has decades of practice writing publishable work; your hour count may be twice his.
In any case, income is uncertain in a gig economy, so until you have enough to survive on interest alone earned by your capital, conserve money like your future life depends on it. Because it does. For a beginning author, advances on books accepted for publication are in the $3000 to $5000 range. The majority of first books never pay another dime after the advance. $3000 for nine-months work? You can't live on $333 a month.
Maybe you can write a best seller. Don't count on it, if you are going to try it, have the resources to survive for three years on homemade sandwiches. And before you begin, make sure your resume is up to date and could get you a job if you fail.
I've been involved, as investor and/or worker, in over a dozen startups. 3/4 failed. The others have paid for those failures and more, but the number one cause of failure, IMO, is relentless optimism that leads to wasted resources (early overspending) and a failure to make any realistic plan for setbacks; because the relentless optimism just doesn't believe they will happen so they treat such planning as a formality in their business plan.
The number one cause of success is realistic pessimism leading to realistic contingency planning. What can go wrong? How will you know it went wrong? How fast can you know it? Is there any way to accelerate that failure into a time realm where you still have resources to address it?
The hardest part of this is trying to come up with definitive bright lines you will use to know when something bad has happened. Your advertising is not working well enough to cover expenses. Your online campaign is costing you $1 in clicks for every $0.10 in sales.
People hate this part of business planning, but you are not planning TO fail; you are planning to NOT fail if various unfortunate incidents befall you. Illness (yours or somebody else's). Or all your agent query letters go unanswered. Or they get answered but your manuscript is always rejected. Or you get terms quickly; how do you know if a scammer has found you?
Don't go into business until you know the mechanics of that business; and once you know the mechanics, put on your author's hat, become a villain, and try to see the attacks and frauds they could make to extract money (or rights) from naive authors and research that. Make a plan to NOT be victimized. Make a plan to deal with rejection. Make a plan to not run out of money before you have given this business a fair shot.
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