Post History

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/37383
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

- **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](https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0060750928)_, 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...

Original score: 6