This is The Write Now podcast with Sarah Werner, Episode 89: Maybe Your Day Job Is Okay.

Welcome to Write Now, the podcast that helps all writers, aspiring, professional, and otherwise, to find the time, energy, and courage you need to pursue your passion and write. I’m your host, Sarah Werner, and there has never been a time when I did not want to be a full time writer. I remember thinking in high school and college, what kind of jobs can I get that will allow me to have the energy and time to write on the side? From a very early age, I identified as a writer, but I had been told and had read and had really sort of learned by that time that it wasn’t practical or it wasn’t feasible to write full time to be a famous writer, the kind that could support themselves fully with their creative work.

I grew up poor and so I knew that money was hard to come by and that bills needed to be paid and that you needed to pay rent and buy food and fix the car whenever it broke down. In my mind, being a writer, having the luxury to do what you loved and did not have to go into a factory every day seemed so impossible. It seemed ridiculous. I don’t know if you had to do this when you were in high school, but they had us take one of those career aptitude tests, and they’re just always wildly inaccurate. I don’t know if it was the answers that I gave this test or if the test was just a joke, but I remember my career aptitude test that I took in high school told me that I was very well suited for a job as a park ranger or a job in waste management.

I remember reading those results with my friends and we were all giggling so hard because we all got suggestions for careers that we maybe didn’t feel we were capable of doing or we had never even thought of. Until that moment, had I ever thought about going into waste management? No, I had not. I’m not saying that it’s not a worthy profession because it’s a very worthy profession, but it was just so far from anything I had ever seen myself doing, but I thought, if I am a park ranger, if I’m in waste management, would I have time to write because that’s what it came down to. I realized then in high school that I didn’t really care what I did full time, as long as I would get to write on the side and that would not be something that I would have to sacrifice.

What do you think about that? Was that a little bit ridiculous that I didn’t say, hey, maybe I could become a writer and just get rid of the middleman, but in my mind, at that time, at that age, being a writer felt as distant and inaccessible as being an A-list movie star. I had just about an equal chance of starring in a movie with Brad Pitt than I did, in my mind, of writing books and making it as a writer. If I worked a day job, if I was a park ranger or a waste management professional, I wouldn’t have to worry about making it as a writer. I would make money from my job and I would write whatever I wanted for fun. I know that for many writers and maybe this is true for you as well, your ultimate dream is to quit your current day job and write full time. That’s the ultimate goal, and honestly, I think it’s a fairly universal goal. Many, many people would love to quit their day job and to do what they love full time and get paid to do what they love full time.

I’m not questioning that in today’s episode. I’m not going to ask anybody to rethink that dream. That’s not what today’s episode is about, because if you want to write full time, it is possible. Don’t be like me. Don’t assume it’s impossible and look for ways around it. Rather, today I want to empower you to make a smart decision and to fully understand what you want. I’m going to talk a little bit, as somebody who now does write and create full time, I want to tell you the pros and cons and be really deeply honest about what it means to write and create full time, because we have an idea in our heads of what it means. At least I did. As I worked in various jobs, I worked for a software company, I worked for a library, I worked for a bank and then I worked for a marketing company. I did not go into waste management as my career aptitude test predicted.

As I went through those jobs and wore uncomfortable business suits and cramped myself in uncomfortable cubicles, I began to wonder if the 8:00 to 5:00 workforce was really for me, I began to dream. Even more than that, I began to see examples. As my career progressed, social media became a bigger and bigger thing and evolved from here’s a picture of what I had for dinner last night to here is what my life is. Here’s what my life is becoming. This is the journey of my life. I looked at other people’s journeys and this became especially big when Instagram became a thing. I even talked about this in the previous episode, episode number 88, The Dangers of Comparison. I started comparing my life, my cubicle life, my 8:00 to 5:00 hard boundaries, you must account for every second of your day, kind of work to what I saw the authors that I followed posting.

They were sharing their lifestyles and it was a lifestyle that I envied. I saw beautiful desks with lattes, I saw houseplants and views out of windows and the lingering of a pen over paper. I began to see, oh my gosh, some people’s lives are actually like this. These people who seem more accessible to me now than ever before, because of social media, they live like this, and because I can see it, maybe this kind of lifestyle is accessible to me too. Question mark, question mark, question mark. In my mind, and from what I gleaned from examples of authors, living their lives in a public forum on social media, what I gathered was that, oh, okay, as a writer, you sleep in until 10:00 AM, you read and have a leisurely cup of coffee, you get to your desk, you write for eight hours straight, and then you relax in the evening. You read more, you have tea, a cat curls up in your lap and purrs gently as you watch the sun setting outside of your window or from the grand vista of your porch.

Wow. That’s a vision I could believe in. It seemed almost too good to be true. The grass on the other side of that fence, oh, it looked so green. If I was a sheep, I would be over there eating that grass, no questions, but fortunately or unfortunately, we’re not sheep. We’re people and we need to ask ourselves hard questions sometimes about where we are, where we want to go, how we get there and what it means to get there because as with anything, there are pros and cons. There are upsides and there are downsides to living your dream and writing full time. I made the transition to writing full time in April 2017. I just came up on three years. Oh my gosh. Has it been three years? Wow. That’s terrifying. Okay. Yes, sorry. Train of thought. Getting back on track. Okay.

I made the transition to writing for myself full time in April 2017. Three years later, I’m still chasing that dream. I’m still thinking wistfully about sleeping in until 10:00 AM and having that worry free cup of coffee while I read in the mornings, to having eight uninterrupted hours of writing time where the words come easily and the ideas flow like honey, to stopping my work at 8:00 PM and watching the sunset over the hills on some kind of porch that I definitely don’t own Write Now. I want to be really careful in this episode not to tell you not to follow your dreams because it’s worth it, or it has been worth it for me. This is all very subjective, but I also want to tell you that in my three years of experience, and maybe it will change radically very soon, or maybe I’ll come back and say something different 10 years from now, but in the last three years, there’s been ups and downs and it has not exactly, or really at all, matched up with the vision of what I thought this life would be like.

I can tell you right off the bat, I am not sleeping in until 10:00 AM, but would I ever go back to working for someone else from 8:00 to 5:00? Absolutely not. For me, it’s hard, but it’s worth it. today I want to talk about some of the things that I wish I would have known; some hard truths that I wish I would have known before I leapt so eagerly into writing for myself full time. I’ll start with the pros. Again, since this is subjective, I want to point out that for me these pros are worth it. They are worth everything. They just far outweigh any of the cons that I’ll talk about in a little bit, which again is why it’s so important that you know what you want, that you know what’s worth it for you.

Number one of the pros, you get to live your dream. I cannot understate or overstate that enough. You get to put your money where your mouth is or your money where your hands do the writing. I don’t know. You get to be one of the few people in the world who chooses what they do for a living and who ends up doing what they’ve always wanted to do. Number two, and this was even almost more worth it for me, and that was you essentially design your own lifestyle and you design it with all of the flexibility and freedom that you want. Now, of course this comes with caveats, which we’ll talk about in just a little bit, but overall, you get to decide what your day looks like. If sleeping in until 10:00 AM works for you, then you can do that. There’s nobody who’s going to knock on your door and tell you, “Hey, it’s 8:00. We need you to punch in.” Nobody’s going to do that.

Number three, there is no perceived waste of energy. What I mean by this is when I used to work in marketing, when I was working in other things, I would get kind of upset because I was like, oh my gosh, I’m using all of my creative energy that I could use later for writing. I’m using that right now for client work. Oh, no. I’m wasting my creative energy. I’m going to put that on our pros list because I think it is a perception that persists. Number four, no terrible bosses or coworkers. Again, this will have a caveat later, but that person who you see every day at your day job who drives you crazy and you just want to smash their face into the wall, you don’t have to deal with them anymore. You don’t have to work with them anymore. They’re gone.

Finally, number five, one of the pros here. When people ask you what you do for a living, you get to say, oh, I’m a writer. Again, there’s a caveat. The caveat being that you’re already a writer, and you can already tell people that you are a writer and that you write, but I’m getting way ahead of myself. Those are the pros that I could think of, and maybe you have more. If you have more that I’m missing, go ahead and let me know in the comments, in the show notes for today’s episode, episode 89, which you can find out on sarahwerner.com, that’s S-A-R-A-H-W-E-R-N E-R.com and then you can navigate to the show notes for this episode and scroll down and let me know in the comments what your thoughts are. What other pros are you looking forward to in a life where you are writing full time?

Let’s talk about the cons. Let’s talk about some of the hard truths that I did not know about until I was waist deep or neck deep or chin deep or forehead deep into this whole thing. You’ve probably heard the saying that if you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life. That is, in my experience, again, remember this is completely subjective. This is completely just my opinion. That is a huge lie. If you love the work you do, it is still hard work. You know this. You’re a writer. Writing is fun, but it’s also simultaneously hard, or it can be depending on your mindset, but I am not there yet. I feel like that is not an episode I can record for several years. Once I hit writing nirvana, I’ll let you know.

Okay. Number one. Now there’s lots of different types of ways you can write full time and the way you have in mind, the way that you want to write, if you want to do full time technical writing for a company, you might not experience these cons. I’m approaching these cons as somebody who is self-employed and writes creatively for myself for my own projects full time. Number one, money, ebbs and flows. When I worked at the marketing agency, when I worked at the bank, I could count on every two weeks I would get a paycheck and it would be for a predetermined amount. I really, really took that for granted. Today, for me, money comes in whenever I sell something, so like a course or a product. Money comes in when I wrap up a project and I deliver that to the client. Money of some kind comes in at the end of each month from my amazing and beautiful donors out at Patreon and it’s really not for a predetermined amount because those patrons can come and go on a whim. There’s really no guarantee. There’s no safety net.

What I had to do before I decided to leave a secure day job and write full time for myself, was build up a safety net. I had to build up my financial runway so that I could take off safely because I knew that in the months ahead I could not count on a certain amount of income. For us, it’s just demanded a little bit more flexibility with our spending and the necessity of cutting spending and costs on months that are leaner and socking away as much money as possible into savings when we do have a lucrative month. There’s that. Second of all, something that I did not think of beforehand, before becoming a self employed person, was benefits, taxes, health insurance. That all goes on to you. Again, unless you’re working as an employee for someone else and doing your writing that way. I had to find my own health insurance. I had to move my 401K, such as it is, to somewhere else. I don’t have pension and profit sharing. Any of those benefits that you enjoy at your full time job, they do count for something.

Okay. Finances aside, maybe you don’t care about that stuff. Again, here is another very subjective con. When I started writing full time, the act and the idea and concept of writing changed very dramatically for me. What do I mean by that? All of a sudden, writing was not a hobby that had a built in element of fun and a built in grace period. All of a sudden, if we wanted to pay off the credit card, if we wanted to eat food, I had to produce and deliver. I had to make money with my writing and it went from something I enjoy doing in my free time at coffee shops or wherever I could squirrel myself away, and it became a butt in the chair, you’re going to produce some words today whether you feel like it or not. Maybe you already have this kind of mindset with your writing and maybe you’re used to it, but for me, when I cranked up the pressure, I also unintentionally cranked up the resistance.

I ended up fighting with myself a lot more and wrestling with myself a lot more on what I was creating. Again, maybe you don’t struggle with that. Maybe that is just because I am a 100% certified weirdo, which, hey, we all know that’s true. Our next con. Again, depending on your personality, depending on your temperament, this might not be a con for you, but I love people. I am an introvert who is cursed to love people. When I no longer had to go into an office, I got a little lonely and it got to a weird place where I felt so isolated and again, over the last year or so, it’s been strange because everyone is feeling isolated with COVID, with being quarantined, so this might not even factor in for you, but I really missed having people who I could not only talk about my progress with on different projects I was working on, but people who understood and who I could complain to when things were frustrating.

I’m not going to say that I missed certain terrible coworkers, but in a way, yeah. I kind of started to miss having coworkers. Take that with a grain of salt. Finally, the last con that I want to talk about that I did not think about before I started doing this was that time is weirdly fluid and quote, unquote, urgent things will still get between you and your writing. I always thought, wow, there’s 24 hours in a day. Maybe if we sleep eight hours, that’s 16 hours that I can write, but if you have been working from home at all over the past couple of months or the past year or more than that, you know that there are always interruptions. Resistance is real. Distractions are real and they get in the way and I am so guilty of this. Oh, I am so guilty of this and I’m so angry at myself for not being able to focus better, but if I get stuck in my writing, it’s so easy to go to Twitter.

It’s so easy to look at all of these other things I have to do now that I’m self employed and prioritize them over my writing. Now that I am doing this full time, I do my own bookkeeping and I have to log all my receipts and I have to pay taxes out of that and I have to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You don’t care about that probably, but earlier today I was stuck on something and I spent an hour and a half doing my weekly bookkeeping and answering emails and doing interviews and doing live streams and going to meetings. Yes, I still have meetings, and planning podcast episodes and doing marketing for stuff. I don’t really get to write for eight uninterrupted hours every day and it’s worse because it comes down to the choices, the bad choices, the prioritization of urgent feelings over important things that I make.

I realize that this episode is going to upset some people and I realize this episode is going to make me look like a huge complainer or someone who has a lot of first world problems. Being frustrated at my own lack of self discipline is a me problem and I am here to admit that to you. It is a challenge that I never thought would be possible, that I never thought I would run into. This is because of the final calm that I’m going to talk about, which is for better or for worse, you are your own boss. If you get a ton of words written, awesome. If you slack off, that’s not awesome and it’s your fault.

Everything that I fail to do is my fault. There’s no chain of command. It’s just me. It’s just me writing. There’s a little bit of leniency in working for someone else or working for a corporation because miscommunications happen, things get lost in different channels, project expectations aren’t communicated clearly, but for me, I know what my expectations are. I know what I need to do. I know how quickly I need to do it and if I don’t, I know that it is 100000000% on me. I have had a very grand lesson in how big of a loser I am over these past three years, how hard it is for me to focus, how easy it is for me to be distracted, how easy it is for me to prioritize things that ultimately don’t really matter over my most meaningful and important work.

Again, I want to talk to you about this today because, well, not because I want to get really angry with myself and frustrated with myself and not because I want to whine about something that it sounds like I am vastly taking for granted, but rather to help you set expectations for if and when you decide to write full time. I want you to know potentially what you might be getting into, because these are things that I did not know when I first got into it. Basically, I want you to learn from my mistakes. I want you to make better choices. I want you to be prepared for the days when your brain does not want to focus and I want you to have a plan for that. I’m realizing Write Now that I haven’t really told you how I did this. I’ll give you a quick overview of what I did to quit my day job and to write full time.

Basically, while I was working at this marketing agency, I was also, in my free time, doing the Write Now podcast, which was making a little bit of money, not a whole lot, but a little bit. Enough to kind of pay for itself hosting wise. I also, through that podcast, got the opportunity to A, write for Forbes and B, ghost write books for other people. While I was working full time, I would put in my 40 hours and then in my quote, unquote free time, because we all have so much free time, I would work on my podcast, I would work on the books I was ghostwriting, I would write my Forbes articles. The income that I made for my day job combined with the money that I was making from these other endeavors helped me build up that financial runway that I talked about earlier. It also allowed me to build up rapport and sort of a client base as I went into the next phase.

I quit my job in April 2017. For a while, I bridged the gap with books that I was ghostwriting. I also began to do content marketing, so different blog posts and website redesigns, and just all sorts of freelance work right after that. It’s not like I quit my job and then the next day I sat down and began to write my novel. That’s not how it worked. It was very gradual. I was writing full time and podcasting, but it wasn’t necessarily what I wanted to be writing. Not all clients are a good fit for you and not all clients are amazing, but many of them were very, very cool.

Finally, I wanted my own creative projects because you can only, well, again, this is all very relative. I could only write for so many hours a day before I ended up craving something of my own to work on. That’s when I started Girl in Space and eventually Girl in Space got to the point where it was supplementing my income enough that I could stop doing the book ghost writing and focus on that. It also sort of released me from some of my other freelance writing work. Then I got to the point with Girl in Space where I was bringing in some money on Patreon and also I am still not allowed to really talk much about this, but I have sold some of the rights for the intellectual property of Girl in Space. That, in addition to the funds that I can generate from my Podcast Now podcasting course has freed me up so that I’m no longer writing for other people. I’m only today writing things for me, for my brand, so my newsletters, my podcasts, Girl in Space, some other projects that I’m working on. That’s kind of how that all evolved.

My question for you is what do you want? What do you want to work toward? What do you want your daily life and your daily routine to look like? It’s a hard question to answer and it’s a little bit overwhelming. I went from a place where I was told what to do every minute of the day to I’m going to sit in my office and I’m going to do work for my clients and I’m going to write and, oh my gosh. If you’re thinking about writing full time and making that switch, I encourage you to write down what your ideal day would look like. Then if you have any PTO, paid time off, saved up at work, if you have any sick time, vacation time, I encourage you to take a chunk of that and just give it a test drive, give it a try. Take a week, take three days, take two weeks if you have it. Whatever it is, set your schedule and pretend during that time that you’re writing full time and see how it feels. See how it works for you.

Something that was very key for me was making the most of what I had access to. I encourage you to do the same. I know the title of this podcast episode is Maybe Your Day Job is Okay, and I say that now because when I was working at my day job and squeezing in writing and podcasting into my free time, I really ended up vilifying it. I told myself so often that if only I didn’t have this day job, I would be on my seventh novel by now. If only I didn’t have to do this day job, I would be… fill in the blank, a famous writer, the poet laureate.

I don’t know what I expected, but now that I’m on the other side where the grass maybe looks a little bit greener, I’m looking back on the other side of the grass, which now looks green to me and I’m saying, “I remember what it was like to not have to watch all of my money go away to taxes, or I remember what it was like to have paid time off. I remember what it was like to have vacation time. I remember what it was like to come home after a long week of work and know that I have the entire weekend ahead of me to write for fun.” I was talking with a friend and fellow writer the other day who currently works a day job and plans on never leaving because their day job funds their writing habit and they like it that way. Their day job pays for their writing habit. Again, if you remember back to the beginning of this episode, that’s kind of what I always thought I would be doing; raking in money from a non-demanding day job and then coming home to write.

There are, of course, famous stories of famous writers with day jobs, including the poet William Carlos Williams, who was a doctor by day and who would scribble famous poetry between patients and was, by all appearances, very happy to do so. Comedian Sara Benincasa published a book that I purchased called Real Artists Have Day Jobs, and essentially her point is similar to the one that I love to make so much on this podcast, and that is that if you are writing, you get to call yourself a writer. You are already a writer. You’re a writer right now. Nobody else gets to tell you. You don’t have to have an office with a plaque on the door that says your name here, comma, writer, before you can call yourself a writer. You can do that right now. Go make business cards that have your name and writer underneath it and hand them out to everybody.

It’s so empowering, but it’s so interesting for me now to read something that says real writers have day jobs and to feel like, oh wait, I don’t have a day job anymore. I know that that message is not for me, just like the things that we create are not for everyone, but it still kind of hit me like those, oh, real women have curves. There’s women out there, people who identify as women, who are not curvy and they are still women. I don’t know. I just get really uncomfortable when somebody asserts maybe an unnecessary division. I want to go back to the philosophy that if you write, you are a writer. If you choose not to have a day job anymore and to write full time, you can still be a real writer. You do not need to retain your day job to be called a real writer, but if you want to retain your day job because it gives you financial security, because it gives you somewhere to go and print things for free, more power to you.

What I’m saying with this episode, or what I’m trying to say with this episode, is that I want you to live the life that is right for you. There are pros and cons to having a day job. There are pros and cons to writing full time. Heck, there are probably pros and cons to being a billionaire. I wouldn’t know, but no matter where you are in your career, in your life, the grass might always look a little bit greener on the other side. It’s up to you to make a firm decision about the grass that you want to stand on, and it’s up to you to find fulfillment and contentment with wherever you are.

I spoke a little bit earlier about my wonderful and glorious Patreon supporters, and it is thanks to them that today’s episode is made available to you. Special. Thanks go out to Amanda King, Amanda L. Dickson, Julian Vincent Thornburgh, Laurie, Leslie Madsen, Michael Beckwith, Regina Calabrese, Sean Locke, Susan Geiger, Tiffany Joyner, Leslie Duncan, Lydijia Hurni, and Sarah Lauzon. Thank you each and every one of you for your generous giving, and my cat Midori, who is helping me record today, says thank you as well.

With that, this has been episode 89 of the Write Now podcast, the podcast that helps all writers, aspiring, professional, and otherwise, to find the time, energy and courage you need to pursue your passion and write. I’m Sarah Werner, and I’m going to go focus on some writing.