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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/37335
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/37335
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

### 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](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StarvingArtist) trope if they didn't have some other means of supporting themselves, and many never get their "breakthrough" at all.

Original score: 28