The conventional advice, when pursuing writing as a career, is not to give up your day job. Generally speaking, good advice! One still needs to be able to support themselves.
Which I ignored, for several reasons. Firstly, the place where I was working had become untenable to me and I had to quit for my own health regardless. Secondly, I had the means, thanks to a very understanding and generous father. Thirdly, I’ve always learned best by jumping in the deep end.
I always knew I’d go back to working for someone else. There was a part of me that wanted to believe I wouldn’t have to, but more and more lately I’ve been coming to understand that the conventional advice isn’t just for pragmatic reasons.
It’s about play. The pressure to generate an income has made my writing ten times harder. At first, having the time off was wonderful. Then the plague hit. And slowly, progressively, I’ve been getting more and more tired and less able to write like I did. For one thing, I need a break. (The whole world needs a break.) For another —
For another, there is a vast difference between putting in the effort and doing the work.
For me right now, writing is work. That’s not how it should be. The publishing side? Yes. That’s work. It’s business. It’s crucial to developing the career. That means there’s some degree of scheduling required. Some degree of discipline. In order to publish, I need something to publish.
But the writing itself shouldn’t be about work. It should be about fun. Even fun requires effort. Especially for my generation, who are perennially burnt out, and find it more difficult than previous generations to put down even long enough to rest, or muster the emotional investment in something we enjoy. Anything which which passion wrought requires effort, and tenacity.
Effort is not work. Effort is, often, its own reward, along with its friend, satisfaction.
I think people my age and younger have been duped into thinking that it is work. That effort is obligation. That anything worth investing in must, by definition, be work.
I want to earn my living writing because I know I can write, and because having that as a career means that I can choose my own schedule, that I can reject the conventional capitalist hours. That I can be lazy, consciously, deliberately, and enjoy it — provided I’ve done the work.
That’s going to take both work and effort.
Right now, I’ve put in the effort. I need to put in a little more before I can put down for the upcoming holiday. And I’ve done the work, and it’s leeched all over what ought to be fun. It needed to be done, because I needed to learn it — and now I need to untangle it from what it shouldn’t be.
I used to think I’d never go back. Now I’m almost looking forward to working for someone else again, if only to give my writing room to breathe. It’s a bad time to have to go looking, but it’s better than the alternative.
The last year has been my ‘gap year’, which I took to learn — on the job, as it were. Now it’s time to separate my work from my effort.
There will, of course, come a point when I’m earning enough from my backlist that what I write and when I write it doesn’t matter quite as much, as long as I’m still writing. That day isn’t now. But I’m looking forward to it, and preparing for it, by removing the pressure, so that I can continue to give the effort to writing which it deserves.
Aurichalcum Publishing 