Reblog: Yes, Virginia, Writing is Too a Job
As you may or may not be aware, there was a recently a fairly high-profile article saying that writing isn’t a job. It’s an opinion I encounter a lot, but not as much as I expected to when I first began announcing that I was a writer. For the most part, people I speak to treat this job title with a great deal of respect and are genuinely interested in what I do.
While it’s true that quitting your day job after one or two books isn’t usually a viable move – we’ll be publishing book #26 next month and Aron still works full-time – the idea that writing isn’t a real job still gets my feathers all fluffed. And as usual, Chuck Wendig said it better than I could hope to, and with even more swearing:
Writing is a job. And to suggest it’s anything other than that gives in to the persistent myth that writing is some kind of joy-fueled reward factory, where the writing alone is enough to feed itself. Where we pretend that starvation and sadness are implicit to the role, and that getting paid is so rare and so strange we can’t even call it a job or a career anymore. That’s dangerous. Starvation is not a requirement. Starvation is not sexy.
That’s not to say every writer must aspire to also make it their profession. It’s totally fine to do it as a hobby. No harm no foul if you do it just to do it, just as there’s no harm no foul if you inseminate bears just to do it.
*is handed a note*
Correction: you should not randomly inseminate bears. That is, according to my lawyer, “illegal.”
