Giving up the Day Job to Write
It’s a dream that many people have – but is it a realistic one? If you consider yourself to be a writer, and you want to try and get to the point where you can give up your day job in order to make a living writing, then there are a lot of things you are going to have to consider. The truth is that it is something of a challenge to be able to do this, but that it is not beyond your reach, especially if you are a good writer. In this article, we are going to take a look at some of the things that you should bear in mind in order to make it much more likely that you can give up your day job in order to write.
Practice, Practice, Practice
Before you even countenance the possibility of giving up your day job, you need to first spend a lot of time practising your craft. The more you practice, the better you will get, so it is important to ensure that you put a lot of time and effort into this if you want to end up with the ability to do it for a living. If you feel that you are a writer but you are not actually spending much time writing, then the important question is: are you really a writer, or just someone who daydreams about it?
This is an important thing to think about, and many would-be writers never get anywhere because they only ever think about it, and don’t actually do it. If you do that, you are not going to make it a living, or even a full-time hobby.
Bear in mind that practising just means writing. As long as you are sitting down at your desk every day and writing something new, you can be sure that you are going to improve over time. It doesn’t matter whether you write novels, non-fiction or poetry, the important thing is that you put the hours in at your desk. If you can do that, you will find that you are going to be able to improve to no end – and that will make it much more likely that you can ultimately make a career out of it. Without that practice, it will be basically impossible to do so.
Analyse Your Intentions
It’s important to appreciate why it is that you want to do this as a career. That’s because you may or may not actually be able to achieve your goals and dreams, depending on what they are. The more closely you analyse your intentions, the more of an idea you will have of what you are going to be able to do, and it also means that you have a clearer sense of just what you expect to get out of such a life. If you desire riches and fame, then there are probably many other career paths that are going to get that for you. If, however, you want to spend your life creating works which you can be proud of, and hopefully making some money from them, then that is a much purer intention, and a much more likely outcome on the whole as well. Analyse your intentions, and see whether this is really what you want to be doing.
Timing
If you are really sure that you want to quit the day job, then you need to make sure you get the timing right. If you fail on that front, it could mean that the whole project is a disaster, which is evidently not what you want, so this is very important to consider. Timing it well means that you are in a situation where you can comfortably give up your job, and perhaps not make any money for a while as you try to find your feet in this new career.
All this is said with the caveat that you are not going to merely jump in head-first, but that you have started trying to make in-roads in your new writing career firstly, and not just hoping that it will work. That being said, you also need to be careful with this issue of timing.
Look at your finances. If you take a look at this article on ‘Some Ideas That Could Transform Your Financial Situation’ you will see that there are plenty of things you can do to try and get your finances to a point of financial freedom. That is the situation that you want to be in as you try to forge a career in writing, or as close to that as possible. If you don’t have to worry about money, at least for a while, then you will be able to put much more of yourself into your writing, and you can just work at that without having to worry about money or feel guilty about not earning anything at first. You can make money with writing, but it will often take time to get there.
Get your timing right, and it is much more likely that all else will fall into place too. This is one of the most important things that you need to focus on, so make sure that you give yourself the freedom to do so. It really does make an enormous difference.
Different Paths
When you are ready to take the plunge, you need to set out deciding on what kind of path you think you are going to take. There are so many ways to make a career out of writing, and mostly this will depend on what kind of writing it is that you want to do. But it’s also something that you are going to have to think about more widely. Many people who dream of writing for a career are thinking of writing novels. This is both one of the most satisfying careers out there and one of the most volatile. But if you really work at it and produce great work, there is no reason to suppose that this is beyond you, and it is something that you will want to work on as soon as you can.
Or you might want to become a professional blogger. This is a relatively easy way to get into professional writing these days, and many people are turning to it every day. What’s more, it’s something that you can work on and build up in your spare time before you quit the day job, and get it to the place where it is truly making you enough money – and then you can give up the day job at a good time. That is a comfortable and secure way of doing things, and it’s going to make a huge difference to how good you feel about the whole situation.
Or you might be thinking of something more obscure, such as writing poetry. People say that you can’t make a career out of poetry, but that’s not true. What they mean is that you can’t make a career out of poetry book sales. You can make a career as a poet, with all of the surrounding things that you do to make money that way – such as giving talks, teaching and lecturing, doing book tours and signings, appearing on television and radio, and much else besides. If you work at it, it’s possible to make a living this way.
As you can see, it is always going to be possible to give up the day job to write – but you do need to approach it in the right way.
