Are you ready to be a full-time writer?

weighing it up

After my post last time on the mad roller-coaster of a writing career (We’re all clinging on by our fingernails’) I thought I’d do a more sensible analysis of the pros and cons of full-time writing.

Before I was a writer, I was a lawyer. I started writing when my kids were young, and eventually found an agent. My first book came out in 2011. At that time, I was working in legal policy for a charity and I found that I could write around my job but what I couldn’t do was lit fests or school visits or any promo work that took time away from work. I started to get quite over-whelmed and, by 2014 I was beginning to wonder whether I could write full-time. Here’s what went through my head:

Can I earn enough?

Hmm. Well, I’ve never earned as much from writing as I did from law. I get by, but writing is unreliable and unpredictable in terms of income. You could have a good year followed by five low-earning years and of course you don’t get a pension or sick pay or any other financial benefits. I still do get a spike of anxiety in royalty times (March and October) in case I haven’t earned enough. That feeling never goes away.

Whether you’ll actually make enough to live on is such a personal calculation. Before I left my old job, I made myself an honest budget. I worked out where I could cut my cloth; what I was willing to give up and what I would gain. I do have to be more careful with money now but I don’t miss too much of my old life, and, for me, the gains are definitely worth the cutbacks.

Look at your last year of outgoings. I’m not going to give you financial advice but I bet there are things you could definitely cut back on. As a guide, I probably earn around as much as a teacher. That’s from my writing plus other work like school visits and mentoring. Some years have been more, some years less but that’s probably how it’s averaged out for me over the last 10 years of full-time writing work.

I do miss a pension and now, when some of my older friends are thinking about retiring, I realise how important that workplace pension really is. Retiring with a guaranteed annual salary (index-linked in some cases) is quite normal for some of my friends – and absolutely beyond my wildest dreams. I can’t even imagine a time when I can afford to ‘retire’. What would that even look like?

Will I miss colleagues?

You will. Those water-cooler chats are far more precious than you realise. But you can make a new set of colleagues. I have regular phone chats or zooms with writing friends. I couldn’t survive without them. I need to rant about my book that isn’t working or a publisher who’s being annoying or all the other weirdo bits of writing life that nobody other than a fellow author/illustrator would understand. I also do real life plot-walks or retreats or lunches. Writing fulltime allows me to build in room for that in a way that I wouldn’t have achieved if I worked part-time.

Will I miss working in a ‘proper job’?

There were many aspects to my worries about this.

• Would I miss the academic intellectual stimulation of legal work (which uses a different part of my brain from creative work)?

• Would I miss being part of the ‘capitalist work culture’ of the morning rush, the sense of belonging to a social structure; like ants marching down the street and into our offices? (Ha! I’ve never missed that!)

• Would I still have a sense of purpose?

Some of these worries were well-founded. I discovered I did miss some of the rigours of law and academic work. But I’ve found replacements for them. My work at Society of Authors involves strategy and policy and drafting and legal knowledge. And, although I don’t earn from it, it does bring me a sense of accomplishment and achievement.

The ‘sense of purpose’ angle of writing is sometimes tricky. When you are at home writing, you can lose that notion of ‘today I have to do X’, because you could probably do it tomorrow, or Sunday or in the middle of the night. Even more so if you aren’t under contract to write a book. But when I look at all the books I’ve managed to write (book 60 comes out in April!) I do feel a sense of purpose, a sense of legacy maybe. I have achieved a solid amount of ‘work’. And that helps motivate me to keep going.

Book number 60!

What about my mental health?

There’s no doubt that writing is tough on mental health.

In a proper job, when you do a project, you get paid for it and someone says ‘well done and thank you’ EVEN if the project doesn’t end up being perfect or all that helpful for the company.

In writing, a publisher might ask you to work up a synopsis or idea. You could spend a month on it (unpaid) and then, after all that, the publisher - far from saying ‘well done and thank you’ - either doesn’t even answer your email or emails back to say that, on reflection, it’s not really right for their list.

Over time, I’ve built up the stamina to start again when a book isn’t right, and I’ve learned to accept that not everything I spend time on will be published. But sometimes I do wonder whether the hyperintensity of a writing career isn’t all that healthy. Writing can be very insular. Having side interests – hobbies, jobs – that are nothing to do with writing CAN help both in terms of mental wellbeing and in terms of giving us ideas for books.

I get my joy from the process, the craft of writing. And I try to remember what ‘success’ looks like for me: it’s being able to write for a living, and every year I get to do that is a win.

What about my lifestyle?

My day-to-day life looks very different now. I have much more flexibility in my day, and sometimes I have to force myself to switch off. I do find it hard to stop thinking about work, and even on holiday I always have a notebook with me to scribble in. That side of things has got worse writing full-time, as I feel like this career has swallowed me up and I’m so enveloped by it that all I want to do is more of it.

I don’t ‘write’ (ie physically type) all day but I do think about writing all day. I tend to type for a few hours in the morning, then I go for a walk after lunch and maybe plot out a few things, or paint while thinking about my book or read for research/ideas.

Will I regret it?

This was the biggest question for me back in 2014. I’d already spent a long time training to be a barrister, and a long time working out what area of legal work I enjoyed most. I was incredibly concerned that if I gave it up, and regretted it, I’d find it hard to go back.

I have never regretted leaving law, and I definitely made the right decision to leave a full-time non-writing job. I do sometimes wonder whether I would quite like a gentle part-time job like working in a sweet shop(!) or a library a couple of days a week, to take away the intensity of writing. Of course, then I have a mad spell of deadlines and lit fests and I realise there would be no way I could fit in my sweet shop job.

The truth is, sustaining a long-term career in writing isn’t easy. Publishing can be fickle. There are times when your work sells really well, and times when it doesn’t. You definitely need to build this into your business plan. You need the resources (financial, mental, physical) to ride out the low patches. But if you know this, and can factor this in, you can prepare yourself.

Are you thinking of writing full-time? Ask me anything!