What with the pandemic and self-isolating and stay-at-home orders, I’ve been seeing a lot of advice sites tell people to “start writing that novel now!”
I’ve also seen my in-box fill up with emails from people who suddenly don’t have to commute, aren’t going out with friends every night, and don’t understand why they’re having so much trouble “writing that novel now!” This is for them.
Dear would-be and part-time writer:
You know how you always said you wanted to write full-time? Make a living telling your stories on paper?
This is what it’s like.
OK, if you have school-age kids to wrangle who suddenly need home schooling, you have more on your plate than you would have had as a full-time writer pre-Covid, but mostly? This is what it’s like.
My day-to-day life hasn’t changed much in the three-and-a-half weeks since I’ve been isolating and social distancing. I go to the grocery store less often and a bit later than I used to, but I always went at weird hours because I don’t like shopping in crowds. I have a couple of weekly get-togethers that have switched to Facetime. I don’t get last-minute invitations to go out to lunch or dinner. It hasn’t been a big change for me … not this year.
The shock came thirty-five years ago, when I quit my day job and went full-time as a writer. And it wasn’t the difficulty of writing a novel that was the shock – I was on my sixth or seventh novel by then. It was everything else.
Just as many people are reporting now, I had great ideas about all the things I would do with the free hour-and-a-half I used to spend commuting (in addition to all the writing I would get done, of course). And just as people now are finding out, the fact that you are at home, with more time, does not mean your dream life will suddenly fall into place. You still have to make it happen.
Making it happen is work.
My day job, it turned out, gave my day a shape that I did not ever have to think about. Being on time at the office meant I had to get up, shower, dress, eat, and catch the bus within a certain time frame. Breaks and lunch hour happened at regular times; so did the bus home and dinner. The time I had for writing, socializing, and life maintenance chores like laundry was specific and well-defined.
When I quit, all that went out the window. I could sleep until noon, lounge around in pajamas all day eating nothing but tortilla chips and guacamole, reading, and binge-watching my favorite videotapes until 2 a.m. (this was 1985; videotapes were what we had instead of Netflix), and repeat it over again the next day. When you have all the time in the world to write, it gets really easy to be distracted or procrastinate.
It also gets more than a little depressing. It took me months to really adjust.
Working alone at home means you don’t get to exchange comments around the office coffee pot with anyone but your housemates. You don’t get casual last-minute invites to go for drinks or dinner after work. If you want to talk to somebody who is not a roommate, you have to call them. If you want to go out for anything (including exercise, which is currently the only random activity that’s still encouraged in a lot of places), you have to make arrangements and go. If you want to have fun, you have to figure out what “fun” looks like and how to make it happen with the resources you’ve got.
For writers, your resources – that is, your income – is irregular and unpredictable. People see the headlines when someone gets a $100,000 advance, and don’t think realize that that money a) doesn’t get paid in one lump, and b) is all the income that writer is likely to see for the next three to five years. (Do the math…) And the vast majority of writers aren’t getting six-figure advances, or even mid-five-figures.
And no matter what sort of advances they are getting, a writer who wants to have an income has to figure out how to structure their day to make writing happen, and then stick to it. Nobody else is going to hand them a schedule. Nobody else is going to give their day a shape. Nobody else is going to figure out when their best working time is, or make them sit down and work during that time instead of doing laundry or painting the kitchen or fixing the widget that went sproing last night.
In other words, for good or ill, if you are going to be a freelance writer, you have to do it yourself. All of it.
You have to write the book, manage the irregular income, decide when you’re working and when you’re not, say “yes” or “no” to autographings, conventions, or (nowadays) Zoom conferences. You have to write today, whether the news is good or bad, whether you feel like it or not. You have to live with being home alone most of the day.
Lots of us make it work. Lots of us wouldn’t choose to do anything else, ever again. But I know several published writers who quit their day jobs and went back to them after less than a year because they needed that external structure. I know a number of others who chose not to quit their day jobs, because they were self-aware enough to know that they needed the external structure and socializing to stay productive.
Freelancing from home, especially if you’re alone, is more than a minor adjustment. It’s a shock to the system. It can take weeks or months to really adjust. And it doesn’t work for everyone. So give yourself some time, and be honest with yourself about whether you’re one of the writers who loves being a full-timer, or one of the ones who hates it. And then adjust accordingly.
Excellent entry, and so timely.
I “went full-time” a few years ago, when I retired. At first I cranked out novel after novel. I self-published because I had my retirement income, and, being retired, didn’t want an editor to tell me what to do.
Then it felt more and more like work. Now I crank out blog entry after blog entry, short story after short story…and I’ve got two novels written, just need to do revisions. They are slowly getting done.
I don’t have any income pressure to write, just the creative drive I’ve always had. It’s not always enough.
I hope everyone trying to go full-time right now reads this.
One of the reasons I did NaNoWriMo the first time I did it, was to sort of “test drive” the life of a full-time writer to see if it suited me as well as I thought it would. And it did, very much, but there’s no question it was a very different lifestyle than my previous fitting-it-in-around-the-edges writing.
That said, if I had the option to go full-time right now, I think I would keep the part-time Day Job, at least until it really annoyed me. And if/when it did drive me to quit, I would arrange some kind of volunteer work or other gotta-be-there activity once or twice a week, just to get me out of the house and talking to someone other than the cats.
Right now is a stressful time. I’ve heard full-time writers saying that the stress has thrown them off their usual stride. For that matter, it’s thrown me off my stride.
So I wouldn’t call this a good time to start trying to write full time. Except for the nine-and-sixty ways and the possibility of writing doubling as therapy. I’m personally thinking in terms of writing things that are in the fluffy wish-fulfillment fantasy end of my range, and that avoid any echos of the current real-world situation.
Yes. The problems are compounded by stress that is not inherent in the change.
Just a little stressful, yeah… As for the avoiding-echoes-of-the-current-mess – ha. My current work-in-progress – started embarrassingly long ago (…around the time of the previous pandemic, actually) – is about a ridiculously deadly epidemic that causes fevers and coughing, among other symptoms. I told my critique group that if they don’t want to read any more of it for a while, I really won’t be offended.
And, thank you for this post! I’ve found that my day job (grading papers, now entirely online, supposedly only for twenty hours a week but actually for however long it takes) has amazingly expanded to eat my entire life, despite the absence of a roughly two-hour commute; I think it’s exactly because there aren’t any schedule constraints (like “the last bus of the night is leaving in twenty minutes”) to force me to stop writing comments and just give the paper a grade already.
Thanks for your blog! ?
I went full time a few years ago, and my therapist warned that it would take a month of adjustment for every year I’d been in my previous job (12!). I was grateful for the warning! I’ve also found that I have to KEEP adjusting and evaluating, partly because I have little kids and their school/summer switch enforces it (and now with school closed ?), and partly because I struggle with different things at each stage of writing and revision. I’m constantly figuring out new ways of working to get more progress from each day, and new ways of motivating myself. I highly recommend Cal Newport’s DEEP WORK for how to optimize the creative brain.
In addition to the structure imposed by a full-time job, I wrote a lot more when I worked full time, because the hours remaining to me to write were more precious because they were so few.