People make time for the things they love. That is why I am always a bit skeptical at first when people tell me that they can’t write because they have a day job…especially when their day job is a relatively non-demanding 40 hours per week.
People have to make time for the things they love, because otherwise they never have time to do them. This is as true for full-time writers as it is for everyone else.
Up until 1985, I had a traditional day job, as a Senior Financial Analyst at a major corporation. I wrote five novels during my last five years at that job, on lunch hour and coffee breaks and weekends (when I got coffee breaks and weekends – it was a more-than-40-hours-a-week job for quite a few months out of the year). Since then, I have had a non-traditional day job: managing my writing career. As I have said over and over repeatedly more than once with considerable redundancy, writing professionally is a business…and running a business, even a very small one, takes time.
From answering fan mail to data entry for my tax records, I have to do dozens of writing-related things that are not actual writing. By far the biggest chunk of time goes to the cluster of activities I lump under “publicity,” which encompases everything from the aforementioned answering of fan mail to updating my web page (which people will note I haven’t done in far too long) to scheduling appearances like autographing. And I do relatively little in this regard, compared to a lot of more socially ept and publicity-aware writers, because I basically hate this part of my job. (Most of it; blogging comes in here, and I like that.)
The second big chunk of time goes to selling. Not to the public – to editors. Yes, I have an agent, and she takes care of most of it, but she still has to come to me with ideas and suggestions and expressions of interest and the very occasional actual offer. Movie deals that fall through (I’m not sure there is any other kind, rumors to the contrary notwithstanding) can eat months. And there is a sporadic low-level stream of little things – notifications of anthology openings, requests to write the introduction to this book, requests to do a blurb for that one (which is several hours gone right there, since I never blurb without reading the ms. first), requests for blog interviews or newsletter articles, requests to donate copies of my books to this or that charity auction – all of which take time to read and answer even if the answer is “No, I’m sorry, I don’t have time right now.”
And then there’s the financial stuff – mainly just tax records and royalty statements, in my case. I gave up on actually selling my own books years ago, because even just the paperwork for collecting and paying sales tax was too much, and on top of that there was tracking for cost of goods sold. It wasn’t worth the effort. But a lot of writers do sell copies of their own books at events or when they’re on the road or just out of the trunk of their cars to random people they meet.
Then we finally get to things that are more directly related to actual writing, like research (of which a lot more is necessary than many people believe). Research falls into two categories: stuff that is related to current WIP (currently the journals of Lewis and Clark), and stuff that is not related to anything…yet (I just bought a book on the history of pirates that falls into this category, as did Mad Princes of Renaissance Germany. I mean, what fantasy writer could resist that title?).
The deceptive part of all this is that it rarely all shows up at once, which means it is easy to discount or overlook just how much time it all takes. If one doesn’t allow for it, though, one can end up with less time to write after quitting a traditional day job than one had beforehand.
I’m not actually complaining…well, no, OK, I am. I’m on my third deadline overrun, and I really need to make this one, or else, so yeah, I am complaining. But I still love my job, warts and all. I just don’t actually have all that much more time to do the production part of it than I had back when I had a day job.
This is just what I’ve found after starting a craft shop online “for fun” while I’m supposed to be writing and drawing full-time. How did a little side-hobby thing end up taking up so much of my time? For exactly the sorts of reasons you mentioned (and which I have ranted about on my blog: http://satsumaart.wordpress.com/2009/11/07/update-on-yoga-mat-tote-and-thoughts-on-my-shop/). There are product photos to be taken, research to do and forums/blogs/advice to read, people to contact, and so forth. Even if my shop is teeny tiny and hardly makes me any money yet, I still want to do it right, and that means behaving as if it’s a bigger business, one that I depend on for income. I’m still exploring ways to make it take up less of my writing and drawing time, but I’ve realized that the shop will always take up a good bit of time for as long as I maintain it.
Lisa – Exactly. Running a business, even a small one, takes time. You can either blow off whatever aspects of it you dislike (which generally results in angry customers, lost sales, and in extreme cases, failure of even a small for-fun hobby), or you can find someone else who loves to do the bits you hate and with whom you can work (usually VERY hard to do), or you can hire someone to do those bits (expensive, and often not an option for a small or start-up operation), or you can bite the bullet and do those things yourself to the best of your ability (back to time and energy).
Running your craft shop will probably give you a lot of valuable experience that you can apply to making money from your writing and drawing, but it is likely that at some point, you will have to decide where your priorities are. There is a limit to how many balls any one person can juggle at one time.
accio_aqualung – Excuses are a different problem. All the writers I know are really good at coming up with excuses for not writing. The stuff I’m talking about here are the legitimate and necessary things I need to do to operate my writing business on a day-to-day basis. Production is undoubtedly the most important piece, but publicity, sales, marketing, finance, and so on also must get done. A six-foot stack of manuscripts won’t earn me any money if they’re sitting in the bottom drawer of my desk, or on my hard drive.
I make excuses and put them smack dab in the middle of my way. I am my own biggest obstacle and if you ask, i’ll make it sound legit.
pcw@#3 — Still less a six-foot stack of manuscript _starts_… 😉
I always figured that a novel was like a bridge — no matter how fine, useless until it’s all the way done and reaches the other shore/the end.
Good post!
Ta, L. (Wading to the waist amongst a bunch of crooked pylons at present.)
“A six-foot stack of manuscripts won’t earn me any money if they’re sitting in the bottom drawer of my desk…”
You must have an awfully big desk. >:)
… not that I don’t have a six foot stack of my own, but it fills up three big boxes, not one drawer.
(And yes, I am still trying to get something done with it all. I spent most of today writing a query letter, in fact. Bleh. I will be very glad to get back to actual story writing tomorrow!)
Since you don’t have much more production time than with the day job, and make presumably far less money, I presume your ability to sell and publicize your work have surged greatly to make it worthwhile? You’ve left the gains from the extra workload somewhat implicit.
For me, another big one would be the simple fact of being my own boss – I took a serious hit in income for that purpose during the dotcom craziness, and even failing as I did to make my fortune, it turned out to be worth every glorious year I could wring out of it.
Go that road again, it’s apt to be with storytelling, and it’ll be hard to go back on it. There’s long ways still, before I’m set for that.
Gray@#6
The PR load on writers has expanded hugely since Pat and I started our careers.
The para-writing attention drain also goes up over time, as there are more things going in and out about more titles — subrights and foreign rights and so on. Doing things about, say, one’s e-book presence wasn’t even a thought on the (in my case, quite limited) horizon back when we began.
The being-your-own-boss thing does count, sort of; there are also elements that are more like having dozens of bosses.
For my early books, my involvement was limited to the sending of the manuscripts, checking the galleys, maybe tweaking the cover copy, and then plunging into a news blackout till some months after publication when I would timidly write (snail mail) my editor to find out what was happening with my precious book. Nothing else. (Except the tax record-keeping, natch — less of it, but all done by hand, badly.)
Ta, L.
How much of this applies to someone who hasn’t reached the point of quitting their day job yet?
I would imagine that taxes do and fan mail doesn’t, but I’ve no idea about the rest of it. (Not that I need to worry about any of it any time soon.)
WOW!
I came to this blog via Lois M Bujold’s blog (-which I’ve just seen) and its resonated with some heavy thoughts I’ve been having.
Its inspired me AND given me a kick up the rear!
ta
riz
I’m lucky enough to get to write for a living, though not fiction, which is my real passion. At the moment, I mainly have to make do working on my novel on weekends, when I wake up and feel energized. The rest of the week, much of that energy goes into all my daily writing, even though I’m constantly jotting down notes or coming up with ideas to put in one of my books.
I love to write, but I often end up burned out at the end of the day. It’s tough to come home and relish delving right back into writing again—you can overdose on things you love, after all. I imagine there might be a few professional chefs who get home at the end of the day and can’t stand the idea of cooking another meal.
It’s frustrating at times, feeling like you’d much rather be working on your own project, but as I do get paid to write every day, I’m pretty fortunate. And, after a year of working almost only exclusively weekends, I’ve almost finished my latest novel. So it can be done.
Gray – The mantra that I learned in b-school was “90% of publicity is worthless, but we don’t know which 90%, so we have to do it all.” I don’t actually do it all, but I do far less than many others. I’d scrap all of it if I could, but there are reasons other than financial return to do most of what I do.
Lois – It’s not just the publicity load that has expanded enormously, it’s also the opportunity and ability for those with minimal knowledge and publicity skills to jump into the arena has expanded. The Internet makes it easy to trade ideas, provides tons of new ways to “get exposure,” and allows writers to produce things from bookmarks to mugs and T-shirts relatively easily…and many, many of them do. When I was getting started, a lot of the same conventional wisdom about publicity was around (i.e., the writer has to do it or it doesn’t happen), but you had to work a little to even find out that other writers thought they had to go talk to the truck drivers or ID buyers, or make up bookmarks or other giveaways…and all those things were much harder to do.
nct2 – It’s not quitting your day job that’s the key turning point; it’s selling your first novel. As Lois said, the work load grows as the number of novels you have out grows, but if you have anything at all on bookstore shelves or on offer to the public for money, everything else applies, whether or not you have a traditional day job. Fan mail doesn’t usually get to be a big deal until a) you’ve been around and visible for ten or fifteen years (whether as published writer or as Internet blogger building a fan base), b) you have a big hit, or c) you write fiction for children or teens. You have a certain amount of control over much of it – for instance, if you and your agent don’t actively market foreign rights, you’re not likely to get many inquiries unless you have a hit – but a lot of it will happen eventually if you keep at this, even if you try to duck it. Quitting the traditional day job is what you do when managing your writing career while actually writing becomes more than you have time for (or at least, that’s how I did it).
Dan – I have known very few writers who could work a writing-related day job and still come home at the end of every day and get more writing done. The notes-on-weekdays, write-on-weekends method has worked for a number of people I know, so let me just add that it not only can be done, it can be done with great success (Hi, Lois!).
Pat – Thanks for the encouraging words. And as Lois is one of my all time favorite writers (and an influence on my current work), I’ll take that as encouragement. 😉
Interesting post. I’m with you. I think we do make time for the things we love and which sustain our lives. I believe that we also have to be ready to examine what’s important and be equally ready to shed some other commitments if need be. My day job suffers when I don’t do some creative writing. I feel un-centered and cranky.