Don’t Quit Your Day Job. Or, Do.
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If there’s one fictional trope in books, movies and TV shows that drives me crazy, it’s this: Character dreams of being a writer. But she needs a day job to pay the bills. So she has to forget about writing and do her soulless day job, but always regrets not writing that novel. OR, she passes on the day job and lives hand-to-mouth while writing her novel, but it’s all great because she’s following her dream!
Either way it plays out, this trope makes me CRAZY. I was once a young writer with a dream, and I got a day job (teaching), and since then I’ve written twenty-some-odd books. I’ve taught every school year since 1986 except for one year I was in grad school, and then the seven-year gap while I was stay-at-home parenting two small kids, while also going to grad school part-time and writing both my own fiction and a lot of contract work for hire. As a writer, there’s been almost no part of my career where I didn’t have a day job.
Four years ago, I made a video about this very thing:
As I tried to convey in that video, different things work for different people, obviously. If you have to have 100% focus on your writing in order to be able to create, and you have someone to support you, or a lot of money in savings, or something else that makes that possible, that’s great. Quit the day job (or never get one!) and make a go of it. But the reality is that virtually every serious writer I’ve ever known has written alongside having a day job for some part if not all of their career. And those who don’t have traditional “day jobs” like teaching or librarian-ing or working in an office, are doing a lot of other things to pay the bills — whether that’s writing educational materials or PR for someone’s business, or teaching writing workshops, or doing something that vaguely relates to writing but, unlike their creative work, brings in a regular paycheque.
So I’ve always been a big proponent of the idea that, while you can quit your day job if you want to/are able to, quitting your day job is not a prerequisite for being a writer, or any kind of creative artists. In the real world, artists have to pay the bills like anyone else, and usually come up with a variety of ways to do so. Sometimes more creativity goes into drumming up jobs to pay the bills than into your actual art (well, that and writing grant applications).
In fact, the reason I went back to teaching in 2005 when my youngest kid went to school was that after seven years of doing various freelance contract work, I was tired of hustling and stringing together contracts and still fitting my own creative work into my “free” time. If I was going to be looking for free time to write, I figured, I might as well go back to teaching, which paid a heck of a lot better than freelance writing and required no hustle whatsoever. And that’s worked well for me for the past 13 years, just as it did for the first 12 years of my teaching/writing career before I had kids.
But now … I’m doing it. I’m quitting my day job.
Well, sort of.
Yep, things have changed a bit since I made that video above. It’s a different stage of life and I’m trying something different. This year, I taught during the fall semester, which is drawing to a close this week. In January, I won’t be back. I’ve taken the winter semester off (my job will be waiting for me again in September though!) to see how I do with being a full-time writer. It will, of course, be a big change financially — only working 40% of the school year means only getting 40% of my pay. (Of course, this is mainly possible because my husband has a job that pays much better than mine, and with both kids moved out our family expenses have decreased).
It’ll also be a challenge in terms of how I use my time. For decades I’ve been fitting writing in around other things. How productive will I be when the other things are gone?
Several years ago, I wrote a blog post analyzing what I got done on a “free” day that I supposedly had to devote full-time to writing, and concluded that I might not actually be that much more productive if I had all day to write. I hope that now that I’ve taken a personal and financial risk to dedicate time to writing, things will be different. I have a lot of projects to pursue and goals I want to accomplish, and I hope I’m going to be disciplined enough to put in the time I need to get those things done.
But there’s no way to know until I’ve tried it. So I’m packing up things in my classroom, making lists of what I want to accomplish in January — and looking forward to this new adventure.
