So you want to be a professional writer
By Barbara O'Neal | May 25, 2011 |
What does that fantasy look like to you? How does it look when you project the image of your professional writer self into the future five years, or ten?
Before I cracked the ranks, I’m not sure what I thought about what my actual life would look like. As a girl, I’d read a novel about a girl tracking down her favorite author, and she found her at a cottage by the sea in England. I thought it might be like that, me quietly pursuing my stories under cloudy skies. There would be a cat on the windowsill, a dog by the fire. I’d have a solid body of devoted readers and the regard of the reviewers and the press.
Scholarly. Solitary. Satisfying.
Since I was imagining this life as a young mother, with two hellion boys screaming through the tumbledown Victorian we bought for a song because it was such a disaster, I don’t know how I though I’d leap the pond to my soft little fantasy, but there it was. That was the life I thought a professional novelist lived.
What do you imagine? It’s worth thinking about. What is your fantasy? What might the reality be? What do you really think you’re going to get out of this dream of yours?
I’ve been writing professionally for more than two decades now, and that life is many things, but it doesn’t have much in common with the fantasy. That makes me valuable to you, the aspiring professional writer out there honing your craft, studying the markets, the sales, the possibilities. What does it take to be a professional writer? What can you expect if you follow this path?
First, what qualities will best serve you?
Flexibility
A professional writer has to be flexible enough to shift with the times and the demands of the market. If you can only write one thing, you’ll be out of luck when that one thing dries up—and it will. If you are skilled at figuring out how your voice and words work, you can be adaptable without selling your soul.
Positive thinking
A particular sort of tunnel vision can serve you well in this career. You believe you are a writer with pluck and talent and the brain to learn what you need to know to write good books. You know that it’s only a matter of time before you find the right place for your work. You know that bad things happen—rejections and bad reviews, but that’s okay, because tomorrow is another day. The writer who persists and succeeds knows that good things might happen tomorrow.
A hide like a rhinoceros
Related to the above. Not everyone is going to like your work. Some people will hate it for reasons that have nothing to do with the writing or you. Trust me, people will say awful things about your work. There will be sneers and one star reviews and the literary equivalent of people spitting on your babies. Figuring out how to keep those people out of your head is crucial. The easiest way is to never let them in at all.
Animal cleverness and devotion
A professional writer is a cat, independent and clever, making quick leaps and and clever. She is also a dog, hungry for attention. This might be one of the less attractive aspects of our personalities, but why would anybody spend hours and hours and hours alone in a room, tapping away at a keyboard unless they wanted to get somebody to pay attention to them?
THE CHALLENGES AND REWARDS
Instability
The career is a roller coaster—it goes up and down, up and down, endlessly. You make it to the top of a mountain, and plummet down the other side, where you lie, licking your wounds, until you see another mountain ahead of you. While it is true that the occasional writer makes it to the top of a mesa and lives there at the steady, smooth top for the rest of his career, this is rare. It’s like winning PowerBall or being born looking like Taylor Swift.
The money is particularly challenging on this level. You never know, year to year, how much money you will earn (or not earn). It can be delicious to haul in a juicy check, but not so much fun to make it stretch a year or even two until the next advance comes in. This payment schedule is not the easiest way to develop a good credit rating or juggle things like saving for a child’s college. Know how you’re going to manage this, and know who you are in regard to money. Do you need stability? Don’t quit the day job.
Physical wear and tear
It takes a toll physically to sit and sit and sit and type and type and type and stare at screens and stare at books. Year after year after year. Even with great ergonomics, you’re likely to develop issues over time if you don’t take very good care of the body that houses your talent and brain. Find a way to work out the kinks. Yoga is great and you can do it in five minute breaks. Walk, swim, garden….move your limbs in all kinds of different directions. Move your head to look left and right and up and down instead of straight ahead. Get massages regularly. It is not a luxury. It’s your health.
Devastation
Most careers have built-in disappointment, but there are few with the potential for heartbreak that this one carries. The exultation of a big sale crashes like the Hindenburg when a book just doesn’t appeal to the mass market. You lose the editor you’ve worked with for seven books. There is a natural disaster that keeps your books from making it to the shelves at all. (Blizzards, anyone? Tornados criss-crossing the Midwest? This has been a bad weather year for books.) I can predict with some certainty that you, too, will experience a devastating set back at some point. You will sob over the unfairness, burn with jealousy over the person over there who weathered her storm.
And then you will get up and go back to work. Because that’s what writers do.
Rewards
Why go through all that? Because no matter what the downsides, for a writer who loves the craft and the pursuit of story, this is the greatest career on earth. I am constantly amazed that it actually worked out for me, that somehow, I’ve actually been writing my entire adult life. Wow. How cool is that?
The rewards are massive. There is the worldly reward of seeing the work in print, of hearing from readers who love it or gained something from it, or even say, “you saved my life.” It’s fun to get a big juicy check (even if it has to last a year). It’s a blast to go to dinner in a swank spot with your editor and/or agent and talk contracts and stories and feel a part of literary history, or a fantasy of What It Might Be Like To Be An Author. It’s fun to be the person in your family who is the writer, because most families don’t have the writer and there is status in it.
But the biggest rewards are intrinsic. For the curious, questing, intelligent minds that turn to writing, there is nothing more thrilling than eternally tackling a pursuit that cannot ever be fully mastered. There is the chortling joy of learning something new, every single book. There is the pleasure of research and world-building and story design; there is detail enough for any geek of any ilk.
And there is the bone deep satisfaction of sticking with it, and seeing a row of books against the wall, work that would not exist at all had you not persisted.
If you spun a fantasy of what a writer’s life would be, what was it? (Or IS it?) What frightens you about a writing life? What draws you?
Barbara O’Neal is the author of more than a dozen award-winning, bestselling novels, including the runaway bestseller, When We Believed in Mermaids, which has been published in more than 20 countries and spent many months on the Amazon Charts, as well as the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Washington Post bestseller lists. Barbara lives on the beach in rugged Oregon with her husband, a British endurance athlete who vows he’ll never lose his accent and their zoo of cats and dogs. You can find more information on her newsletter and where to find her on social media at barbaraoneal.com.
Thanks for the insightful tips, Barbara. :)
Thanks for the reminder! It gets tough down in the trenches when you’re in the “one foot in front of the other” and “don’t look up” (rejections galore) phase. Must. Not. Stop.
Great post, Barbara! You captured both the ‘wild ride’ aspect of a writer’s life and the mundane side that coexists with it. When young I had a similar vision to yours, the cosy cottage with a picket fence, the little writing desk by a sunny window etc etc. I’m sure I gave no thought at all to the business aspects of the writing life! Years later, despite the frustrations of maintaining a career as a writer, and the feeling sometimes that I’m scrabbling to keep up with change, I wouldn’t trade this job for any other in the world.
This a great article to reference. Thank you. :D
I love this. I am only a few years into this career as a professional and what I am living now is certainly not the fantasy I imagined, but I’m grateful. This post is one that I will come back to.
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Oh my god, Barbara. Thank you. This post just makes me so happy. Every word. THIS is my dream. This is the life I want. I thank you for reminding me. (All of us, really.) For encouraging me. For taking the pictures, the fears, the hopes — everything in my head — and putting it down for me to read. Thank you.
I need to take that whole paragraph about positive thinking and post it above my desk, on my bathroom mirror, on my dashboard, on my forehead…
Great post!
My fantasy world world would include the clock stopping every time I spent time on the internet, so I wouldn’t lose any work time. Thanks for sharing this.
Smart stuff, Barbara. I especially like your analogy about dogs and writers; so true. :)
Love…”there is nothing more thrilling than eternally tackling a pursuit that cannot ever be fully mastered.”
Even having yet to be published, I’m sometimes boggled by the ups and downs. My fantasy version of this life included bumps, but having been a generally upbeat person before this, I’m a bit shocked by the depths I sometimes plunge to.
I repeatedly have to remind myself of your above statement. Even if I never sell a book or collect a paycheck, this ride has offered me such reward and insight. I am richer for it, so I appreciate it with all my heart (on my good days ;-).
Thanks, Barbara. I always look forward to your insightful posts, and I am never disappointed.
Wonderful post, Barbara. Thank you for being a kind, honest mentor.
Beautiful reminder, Barbara.
All I want is to be somewhere…a bus, a coffeeshop, and see someone reading a book. Like all readers do, you crane your neck to see what they’re reading – and it’s MY book!
Maybe I’ll need to revise the photo to have them reading a Kindle, but it all works!
My first fantasy about being “a writer” was that writers made a lot of money. Maybe not millions (some did, I knew) but six figures, surely.
I learned this was rare. Of the hundreds of thousands of books published in a year, how many make ANY bestseller list? Very few.
My second fantasy about being “a writer” was that writers made a living. Not a great one. Perhaps not even a good one. But at least lower middle class. But that would be enough to support them.
I learned this wasn’t particularly common either. Most published authors have “real jobs” that support them. Writing is an indulgence that perhaps pays for your car or your vacation.
Then I got offered a publishing contract. Granted, I affectionately refer to my book as smutty, lesbian, detective fiction, and its market is small, but when I got that contract offer, I learned that writing would not pay for my car or my vacation. It would be what it had always been. Something I loved to do, and not for the money.
What a coincidence: Kristin Creative is having a blogfest today on this exact topic; writes have to write letters to their future selves. Check it out:
https://kristincreative.blogspot.com/
Love this, Barbara. I’ve been published for twelve years, and survived the Chick Lit implosion (it’s coming back, humor is finally coming back now that we desperately need it!) and focused on my voice rather than the market. This post is such a great reminder of what to do, and not do. And I totally agree with you: this is the greatest career on earth. :)
This was exactly what I needed to read this morning! Lately my WIP has been taking off and I simply cannot quell my excitement. But I don’t think I harbor any serious delusion about what life as a professional writer will be like. Right now, it’s basically like I work two jobs: writing and my day job. I am exhausted, stressed, and totally overwhelmed. BUT it’s worth it. I’m more than okay with living like this. I love both my jobs…and only one currently pays me so I must keep going to that one. Rather than shock me with reality, this post just made me more excited and more motivated to continue reaching for my goals. Thank you for sharing your experiences!
This is such a great, insightful–and for me, true– post. When I was a child and wanting to be a writer, I didn’t really think about what it would be like. I just knew that I liked writing stories and that when I grew up, I wanted to write them all the time.
But now I’ve grown up, so has the Internet and social media. So now even those lucky enough to be full-time writers don’t write “all the time”. A lot of our time now goes to selling, marketing and any other business related to promoting our books and managing our finances. And I love it. All of it. All the social media marketing, the blogging…it just gives me even more opportunity to be creative.
Ideally, I’d like to make enough money to hire an accountant, because I’m rubbish at managing my finances, but I know that’s unlikely to happen, so I’ll just have to hope that practice makes perfect. ;)
I had the same outtake sentence in mind as Vaughn. I think my fantasy was all about reaching a point where you just “got it.” But you’re absolutely right that this is “a pursuit that cannot ever be fully mastered.” I also agree with you that that can be sort of thrilling.
I always love your big-picture posts. They have a way of making me feel both hopeful and challenged. I picked out the same sentence as Vaughn, but this phrase also resonated: “there is detail enough for any geek of any ilk.”
What a great post for writers in any stage of the game. As an aspiring, unpublished author, it’s great to have a common sense checklist to refer too. It’s very easy to get swept up in the fantasy of being a wealthy, jet-setting writer living the life of ease, or to assume that once you finally get that big contract it’s smooth sailing.
Thank you for reminding us that’s not the case!
This post is a wonderful combination of positivity and reality. For me, newly agented with three young children, my fantasy of the “writing life” is just reaching a point where all three kids are in school all day and I can work at a reasonable hour, rather than staying up all night. Daytime writing? Heaven!
Oh, a big sale would be nice, too. :)
Thanks for sharing your experiences!
I can’t tell you how much I love this post. Beautiful, honest, raw, challenging, and uplifting. You are a gifted writer. :)
Wow. This is an excellent post.
I just sold my second novel. And I’ve experienced just about everything that you’ve talked about here.
I have not yet had the “going out of style” experience, thankfully. I really liked what Cathy said about focusing on voice, when that happened to her.
Writers who have not yet published, please take Barbara’s words to heart. It’s all true.
What a wonderful, wonderful post! Thanks for both the dash of reality and the encouragement!
(reposting because my link did not come through in previous post–those blog titles above are not mine!)
My fantasy was uncannily similar to yours: living alone in an English (or Irish) cottage and scribbling away. I would have the cat, but not the dog, and a nice couple would come by every day or two to clean, cook, and keep up the garden. Of course, I also have a husband and four kids; where they would be in this fantasy I never quite figured out.
Learning that these days a writer must also be a marketer, and that an unbelievably low percentage of writers actually make a living at it, pretty much crushed that dream. But it still lingers in the back of my mind and inspires me. Perhaps one day I’ll earn at least a vacation in that vine-covered cottage.
I’ve been trying to make the transition to full time writer for a few years now and your post is both a reminder of why I burn myself out working in the day and writing nights/weekends and why I will continue to push on forward regardless of whether I ever CAN quit my day job. Very very very realistic and inspiring post.
Thank you so much for this balanced look at what might lie down the road and how to handle it. I appreciate the cautions, but at the same time, your words give me hope. One day…
It’s nice to hear that the good times outweigh the bad. That’s inspiring!
Crazy day here, sorry I’ve only just been able to read replies.
I love, love, love that the other professionals here have had the same sort of experiences, and we’d all choose it again anyway.
Which should be the big fat stamp of approval for everybody else. Go!
[…] blogger, Writer Unboxed, wrote a piece on living the life of a professional writer. She writes that she thought writing would be “me quietly pursuing my stories under cloudy […]
Thank you, Barbara, for an insightful essay on what to expect when we “get there”. I never thought it would be all “bells and butterflies” if I got published. I just would like to see my books out there for someone else to enjoy.
I’ve got a big grin on my face from reading this. How I loved it. You nailed it all.
I’m one of those who has the fantasy of living in an English cottage by the sea (or at least, close to it!). But I also know that it probably won’t ever happen, at least not for years and years and YEARS.
My fantasy right now is this: to have a solid career. I don’t need to be on the New York Times bestselling list. I don’t need a six-figure advance (though it would be nice). I don’t want fame. I want to be able to write a book a year, get it published, make a small living (while recognizing I will have to supplement that income some way – either through my husband’s job (ha!), or through my own day job), and be comfortable.
The longer I’m in this business, the more realistic my attitude gets. I am guessing that is a good thing.
Thanks for this. I’m printing it out. :-)
I can only say that this might be the most gorgeous post, ever — as in the whole entire world, ever! So perfectly, beautifully said, I feel nearly speechless with the thrill of thinking, “Yes, oh, yes, this is me.” Not in my cottage by the sea, or basking in adoration, but writing, writing…pouring my heart onto the page day after day…after day.
Beautiful, Barbara. Thank you, thank you!
Every so often, we need a reminder like this, so thank you for posting.
I’ve been in the field professionally since the early eighties… when I won’t say… sigh.
You have it bang on.
Check out Norman Spinrad’s work on contracts (outdated but still useful).
I also quote Harlan Ellison (to my ex) “You’re doing it right if you are approaching the burning core of what you fear.”
I might paraphrase that to “… the burning core of what puts you in awe.”
My favorite: “For the curious, questing, intelligent minds that turn to writing, there is nothing more thrilling than eternally tackling a pursuit that cannot ever be fully mastered.”
This essay is so very beautiful, Barbara. Thank you!
I wanted to be a writer since I was five. No, I knew I was going to be. I’ve been writing for a living since I was 16, though by books only for a few years and my first novel will be out in a few weeks. I never thought it would be glamorous or that it would pay well, but I always thought I’d have had a novel published before the age of 20 (took until 27). Then again, if I hadn’t got very ill at the age of 16, that probably would have happened.
Besides getting the books in my hands, one of the best parts was giving my first author interview a few weeks ago. If there is one reason why I would like to be a celebrity, it’s because I feel I have something important to say. Yeah, I guess almost everyone feels that way, but I really do. Heck, I founded a new genre of fiction on that, too.
Getting the first review of my novel was also wonderful, especially since it was so incredibly positive. Another review I got was so positive I couldn’t have written a more flattering one if I tried. These things are what made it worthwhile to have to wait for this for 22 years.