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For me, back a few years when I was recently divorced with two small children,
with no child support or alimony, and with a job as a registered nurse,
writing was the way
I was going to be able to get out of my income-limited and dangerous nursing
job
(you make enough money as a staff RN that you can survive on your own and feed
your children, but you know that the life you're living isn't going to ever be
much better than it is at the moment when you're looking at your options), to
be home for
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my kids all the time, and to still have a chance to radically change my
standard of living for the better.
I do write full-time and have been doing so since 1992, and my household has
no other source of income. This is how I did it.
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I wrote every day.
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I sent stuff out as often as I could.
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I spent less than I made.
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I never used credit (credit cards are the path to destruction for a writer
something I discovered once I'd made it but after hard times returned).
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I reused, used up, and made do.
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I banished television from the house, so that the time I had with the kids I
actually spent with them.
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I never gave up on my dream.
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I never quit.
If your eyes paused on the little phrase above after hard times returned
you have good instincts. If they didn't, you aren't paranoid enough yet. A
writer is only as secure as his last book's sales, and the publishing industry
has a short memory. You can never breathe easy until you have enough money in
secure long-term investments that you're living off the interest. I'm not
close. Frankly, I'm not even in the
breathing-easy ballgame yet. If at any point in the game I have three
consecutive books that tank, I'm going to be in the line of writers who have
to change their names in order to sell, just like the beginner who has the
same thing happen.
I have the advantages of having had some success, and having a good agent so
with a different name I will probably be able to sell new work. But there are
no guarantees.
Not ever. No matter how good I am, or how prolific, or how dedicated. Making a
living from writing is living on the edge of somebody else's calculator, and
the numbers on that calculator are hard and cold and they know no mercy.
If you're smart (I wasn't for a while, but a couple of very rough years gave
me back my brains) you'll never break the rules I listed above. If you do
break them, you'll probably live to regret it.
And now you're thinking, Why would any human being do this?
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Since I quit my day job, I've been broke quite a few times; I've been flush
quite a few times. But no matter how rough things got, my kids had food every
day and a roof over their heads, and writing has given me relationships with
them that I couldn't have had any other way. Writing has given me friendships
and challenges that I never could have imagined. It has opened doors, let me
reach out to people, let me touch lives. I have seen places I would never have
gone to otherwise. I have done things I
would never have had the courage to try otherwise.
My life is an adventure, and almost every morning I wake up amazed that I'm
the lucky shmuck who gets to do this for a living. Yep even when I'm broke.
Writing is hairy and scary and uncertain, but it's also wonderful and
thrilling and a hell of a lot of fun. If I could be anyone in the world doing
anything in the world, I wouldn't be
Stephen King or Dean Koontz or John Grisham with all their success and all
their money . . . I'd be me, and I'd be doing this. Right here, right now,
making it on my own and climbing the mountain by myself.
What else could anyone ask for?
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Questions About the Business of Writing
How do I keep my work fresh and my enthusiasm up?
Sooner or later, everyone wonders this about any job, and writing is no
different, as evidenced by the number of times this question comes in. You
want to think you're going to stay as fresh on the fiftieth book as you are on
the first, but reading through the works of some of your favorite authors who
have been in the business for twenty or more years, you start noticing a
tiredness of plot and characterization, a sort of gray sameness that creeps in
and leeches the fun out of the latest things they've done.
Then there are those other writers who seem to be able to bring everything in
them to every single book they just keep getting better.
I want to be in that second class of writers, and I'm guessing you do too.
Here are the steps I'm taking to improve my odds. I share them with you in the
hopes that you'll find them useful. If you have anything additional to
suggest, I welcome your comments.
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Read widely outside of your field.
No matter how tempting it is to say, Well, I love romances and I only intend
to write romances, so why waste time reading westerns or hardboiled detective
novels? you have to resist. This is, I believe, the single most important
tool in the professional's arsenal. Read everything. Read fiction and
nonfiction, read old stuff and new stuff, read mainstream and genre, read
biographies and how-to's and the labels on the foods you buy.
"
Don't only read things you like, either.
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