Things to consider when writing as a second job

I don’t think there is a serious writer out there who wouldn’t love to write for a career. Writing for a living is a dream come true, but it’s also something of a rarity. Plenty of writers’ reality is that, for them, writing is something of a second job on top of the day job that pays most of the bills.

This brings with it its own special challenges – after all, it’s much harder to fit in all those crucial aspects of being a professional writer (afternoon daydreaming, regular Twitter breaks, working at odd hours of the night) when you’re busy trying to do a ‘proper’ job as well.

With this in mind, here are some of the things to consider when writing as a second job.

Time

Without doubt, time is one of the biggest factors here. Writing takes a lot of time. Whether we’re talking about the time it takes to write a draft of a book or to edit it or even come up with a good, workable idea in the first place, you usually need a lot of it in order to write well.

And time is in short supply. Working out how to balance a day job with writing is crucial; getting the balance between not neglecting your career and giving your passion for writing enough time is tricky to master, but it’s something we can’t avoid.

Work commitments

There’s no getting away from the fact that if you write on top of doing a day job, that day job is likely to have to take precedent from time to time. It might not be to your liking, and it probably won’t be ideal, but knowing when to focus on one or the other is an important skill.

Developing goals

Something else to consider is how you want things to develop in the future. For instance, if you are hoping to spend more of your time writing in the future, how will you make this happen? What will you do about your day job if you start to have more success with your writing?

This is something that it can be easy to think you’ll just deal with if it ever happens, but having some sort of action plan will certainly make the transition easier.

The opportunities

It can be tempting to see a ‘proper’ job as something of a hindrance to our passion for writing. However, having a day job could provide opportunities we wouldn’t otherwise get. Going out to work brings us into contact with more people and situations than we would experience if we spent all day writing in the spare bedroom. It introduces us to different worlds and scenarios and reactions to events – all useful material that could be helpful in our writing.

What do you think are the most important things to think about when writing as a second job?