I recently had occasion to read some horseshit about how writing full time is really hard and how it takes courage to wrestle with your muse and such like things.
I know this is a common myth because when I wrote full time, people used to say stuff to me like "wow, that takes an incredible amount of discipline".
This myth is propagated by full time writers to disguise the fact that, for the most part, writing full time is a laughably easy job.
I mean, yeah, sure you wrestle with your work, but most of us who write do it because it's fun. So even a bad day of writing is still pretty fun--after all, somebody's paying you to make up stories. And, I mean, it takes discipline to force yourself to write for a couple hours every day, but not anywhere near as much as it takes to, for example, get up every day and be civil to a group of teenagers at seven thirty in the morning, which is what many high school teachers have to do.
Here's what my day used to look like when I was a full time writer:
Wake up 7ish.
Help the kids get off to school.
Walk the dog.
Work out.
Shower.
Head to the coffee shop and write for 2 or 3 hours.
Come home and eat lunch.
Nap.
Email, blog, etc.
Be a full-time after school parent.
Oh yeah, I also got the exact same vacations as my entire family, and I could take a day off whenever I wanted because a friend or relative was in town or even just because a movie came out that I wanted to see. Oh yeah, it was a rough life.
Now, there were some challenges, but they had very little to do with the actual writing. The biggest challenge was financial. My advances were steadily declining, but my household expenses weren't. This made me kind of obsessed with my sales, with the promise of movie deals, and with "breaking through"--getting a bestseller, becoming a household name, and being able to make enough money to contribute to the household.
This actually made writing less fun. I mean, don't get me wrong. I used to work in a job where I took out the lunch trash and sorted the mail and was supervised by a foulmothed tyrant--my worst day ever at writing was still way, way better than that. But still, the financial stress did make it less fun to stay home and make up stories. When you're hoping that everything you write will lead you to that bestseller status that you totally deserve but that has strangely eluded you thus far, you just start second guessing everything .
The other thing that got challenging was the isolation. Even in a coffee shop where I got to know the staff and the other regulars, it wasn't like having co-workers. I am now lucky enough to work in a place where I really like my coworkers and my students, and exercising the social side of my personality on a daily basis makes me a far healthier person.
Also, I mean, the world is where the stories are. I think this is why so many full-time writers end up writing about writers. Because after a while, you lose touch with the rest of the world, and it gets harder to write authentically about the experience of people who don't live inside their own heads all day.
So there you go. There were significant downsides, and, overall, I am much happier in my work now than I was when I was writing full time. I like the immediate satisfaction I get from teaching, and I enjoy my writing a lot more now--I would still like to have a bestseller, but as long as I'm actually getting paid to make up stories, I'm pretty happy and I can focus on how lucky I am to be a published writer instead of how much I envy the talentless hacks who sell more than me.
And yet there are still days when I really miss it. Especially the daily napping.
