Listen:

(Full episode transcript below show notes)

Hello, writers! This week, I’m talking about about our expectations and how they tint our reality and shape our experiences.

If we go into an average movie with low expectations, we’ll probably be pleasantly surprised, whereas if we go into the same movie with high expectations, we’re bound to be disappointed.

The same thing is true for our expectations of what it actually means to write full-time. I recorded this episode because I’ve noticed some… misleading expectation-setting when it comes to being a “full-time artist”. Various people on the internet (most of whom are trying to sell you something) will tell you that all of your writing dreams can come true — if you follow these 3 quick steps! Or that finding an agent is easy — with these 3 quick steps!

Now, your dreams CAN come true — but often, it won’t FEEL like you expected it to feel. I’ve been writing full-time for seven years now, and I’m still reconciling my experience with what I initially expected going in.

So this week, I’m talking about what you can realistically expect from following your dream of writing full-time. And please remember — I’m not here to crush your dreams, but rather help make them more attainable for you.

Thoughts? Comments? I’d love to discuss in the Comments section below. 🙂

As always, thank you for listening, and happy writing! 

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Full Episode Transcript:

Sarah Rhea Werner (00:00):
This is the Write Now Podcast with Sarah Werner, Episode 159: Expectation Versus Reality.

(00:28):
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 today we are talking about expectations versus reality.

(00:48):
You might already be somewhat familiar with this topic if you’re anything like me, and you sit down to record a podcast episode and expect it to be nice and quiet, and then 17,000 trains and helicopters and rusty old cars go by. But seriously, you may have an idea of what this looks like if you’ve seen memes on the internet that compare the expectation of something — so, say, the beautiful idealized version of a recipe, a picture of a beautifully baked cake — versus how the cake actually turned out when your average layperson made said cake… or attempted to make said cake. Expectation and reality.

(01:31):
There’s a little bit of cynicism baked in there, in that the meme sets us up to think that, oh, the expectation is unmeetable — it’s perfect, it’s idealized, and the reality is inevitably a… well, maybe not laughably worse, but definitely lesser when compared to the expectation. You might know — in fact, you probably know from your experience in your life — that this is not necessarily a hundred percent true all of the time. Often, we expect something will be terrible, and it actually ends up being pretty good. We expect to have a terrible time at Aunt Edith’s 85th birthday, but we end up connecting with a cousin that we forgot existed and talking about books. That’s great! Expectation was of drudgery and misery; reality was really not so bad.

(02:26):
There’s also the matter of skill. If you’ve been baking for several years, the cake that you bake may actually look a lot like the picture, or maybe even better than the picture in the recipe. But if it’s your first time ever picking up a mixing bowl and a spoon, be prepared. Your reality might be significantly worse than the expectation, or even the average reality.

(02:55):
I want to talk about this today because it applies to so many different facets of writing and being a writer. The number one thing I hear when I tell people that I write full-time and that I don’t go to a day job and work for someone else is, “Oh my gosh, you are living the dream.” Or, “Oh my gosh, I’m so jealous. I wish I could do that.” And in a way, I am living the dream. I want to acknowledge that right up front. I have been able to do things with my life that I’m extremely grateful for, but even I had a little bit of… let’s call it “sticker shock,” at the disparity between expectation and reality.

(03:35):
When I first started writing full-time… Think of it this way. When I was in high school, all of my friends (and me included) wanted to be marine biologists. We all wanted to be marine biologists because of our perception of what a marine biologist was and did. In our minds, every day, a marine biologist got to go out and swim with dolphins. We were… however old you are when you’re in high school, or maybe it was even middle school, but you have no idea what the work world is like. You have no idea that, okay, yes, you do get to swim with dolphins, like, three days out of the year. The rest of your days are taken up by meetings, by cleaning tanks, by doing advocacy work that no one listens to, by more paperwork, by dealing with coworkers who you cannot stand, by drinking horrible break room coffee, et cetera, et cetera. There’s just so many things that we don’t know to expect. 16-year-old Sarah, had she been given the opportunity to become a marine biologist professionally, right at that very moment, would’ve been very disappointed at the 362 days a year of not swimming with dolphins.

(04:52):
So it can be helpful for us to know what to expect. I don’t have kids of my own, but I actually have a friend who just had a baby and was reading that very famous book, What To Expect When You’re Expecting. And basically the book does its best to prepare you and to set your expectations for what happens during pregnancy. Like, “Oh, hey, did you know your body’s going to do this? I bet you didn’t.”

(05:17):
I think it’s important to say right off the bat (which is a cliche, so I hope you forgive me), but I really think it’s important to say that you cannot be blamed for not knowing what you don’t know. It is not your fault if you are a 16-year-old who is really excited about being a marine biologist because you think it means you get to swim with dolphins all day. You don’t know any better, and that’s okay. I also really can’t blame the people who say, “Oh my gosh, I’m so jealous. You basically don’t work for a living. You get to have fun and write all day.” I don’t blame those people too much for not understanding what it is I do, because I feel much like a marine biologist.

(05:59):
The idea, the vocation, the career of a writer is very, very highly romanticized. Even I had this romantic fantasy before I quit my day job when I was even writing and getting paid for it, but was also working a day job. I had this wild expectation for, “Oh my gosh, when I quit my day job, I’m going to be able to write for eight or more hours a day. I’m going to sit there at the window at my desk drinking good coffee and or tea and or both, and watching the world go by and listening to the rustling leaves in the trees and the songs of birds as I write as much as my heart will allow.” I didn’t even think of writing as much as my heart would allow actually, because I wasn’t imagining at the time that there were any limits to my time or energy that I would deal with. Because when you’re a full-time writer, you sit there and you just daydream and write all day, right?

(07:03):
This is, as you may have already guessed, a bit of a leading question, and I say this with full earnestness because this is exactly what I thought it was going to be when I left my day job in 2017 to write full-time. In fact, I’ve been writing full-time for seven years now, and I’m still figuring out what it means to write full-time. Present me cannot blame past me for romanticizing the vocation, for expecting that it will be a magical, beautiful experience. Just like 16-year-old me didn’t know that a marine biologist doesn’t get to swim with dolphins 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

(07:48):
I’m not going to set up this episode to be a sort of “what to expect when you are expecting to be a full-time writer,” because every writing career is different. There’s not just one set of expectations. There’s not just one set of things to expect or to anticipate or to prepare for. I’ve written for magazines, I’ve written for the internet, I’ve done content marketing, I’ve written for social media, I’ve written for marketing purposes (ads), I’ve written podcasts, I’ve written novels, I’ve written short stories and poems, and I’ve even written for TV. And even with all of that varied experience, I’m still not comfortable telling people exactly what to expect from a full-time writing career, or even from a writing session, or the writing experience overall. However, I do know what has worked for me and what has been true for me, and that is the experience that I want to share with you. And I hope that it’s valuable.

(08:53):
Your writing journey will not look like my writing journey. My writing journey does not look like anyone else’s writing journey. That’s because we are artists, and we come to our art as humans, and every human experience is richly and uniquely different. I know that the whole thing about “everybody is a unique snowflake” has become kind of a cliche and even kind of a mean thing to say to someone, but we are all individual and unique. Your fingerprints don’t match anyone else’s fingerprints, so your writing journey and your experience are not going to match anyone else’s journey and experience. But what’s valuable is we can learn from each other, and we can support and encourage each other as we go.

(09:39):
So here’s what my day looked like when I first started writing full-time. Now, when I first started writing full-time, I wasn’t just able to work on projects that I wanted to work on. I was doing freelance, which I think is how a lot of writers begin. So freelance means that you are taking writing jobs from someone else and getting paid to do them. One of the hardest parts of freelance work is finding freelance work, finding someone who wants to hire a writer for a one-off job or for a recurring job. And that’s part of the job itself, and it’s a part of the job for which you don’t get paid. So when I was both freelancing and working on my own creative stuff, I would get up early, I would make coffee, feed the cats — the ritual —, sit down, and I would prioritize my own creative writing. And so I would write for three to four hours on my creative writing project, and then I would break for lunch, and then when I came back, I would work on my freelance stuff.

(10:48):
So I would work two to four hours on my creative project in the morning, and then the afternoon I would work four or five hours on a client project. This may sound very similar to what you’re doing now if you’re at a full-time job and managing to squeeze in some writing time of your own on your own projects. There were definite perks — I didn’t have to stick to that schedule. If my writing energy was better from midnight to 4:00 AM, then heck, I could do my work at that time, and there was nobody to say, oh, you have to clock in exactly at 8:00 AM, and you have to do this and this and this. So that was actually very nice. I can also, at the drop of a hat — if my sister calls, if something happens, I don’t have to ask a boss if I can leave, if I can take a quick break, if I can take a half day. I can just go and take care of the things in my life that need taken care of. That is also a huge perk for me, and it’s worth it for me.

(11:45):
But there’s also things that I didn’t expect I would miss from a full-time day job — like coworkers who I actually like, the ability to make friends, the ability to learn from other coworkers, the ability to work on projects as a team, PTO (which here in the United States stands for paid time off, which is essentially your paid vacation time). I read a report once, and I don’t know if this strikes true for you, but the average office worker actually works on their work between one and three hours out of their eight hour workday. The rest is all taken up by meetings, by chitchats, by water cooler visits, by… et cetera, talking about fantasy football, whatever it is. I don’t know if that is true for you, but when I think back on my career in marketing and all of the other things I’ve done, one to three hours, maybe four hours on a really solid workday project-wise, is what I was able to get done. Because when you work for yourself, there’s no water cooler, there’s no getting paid for the day even if you didn’t do a whole lot — there’s just delivering on your project and getting paid for it. Hopefully.

(13:03):
That’s another part of the freelance sort of work that nobody tells you about — is that sometimes people do not want to pay you, even after they’ve hired you and you’ve done the work. You’ve done what they’ve asked for, you’ll write them an invoice and you’ll say, okay, hey, if I could get paid in the next two weeks, that would be great, and then like eight weeks go by and you’re like, haha… It’s… Hey, it’s me again. Can you please pay me for my work? Chasing people down to get the money that you earned from them is, again, another part of the job that no one really talks about.

(13:37):
Now, I’m not saying that the grass is greener. I’m not saying now that, oh, I’m looking back on my full-time employed days working for someone else with rose-tinted glasses, even though rose-tinted glasses would make green grass look brown. I’m just saying that I’ve learned that there’s balance in everything. Nothing is ever 100% good or 100% bad.

(14:02):
This is something I have had to learn time and time again, and, for me at least — because I don’t want to tell you what your experience is or has been or will be — for me, it has ended up being about, what am I willing to sacrifice, and what do I really and truly want and value from my work as a writer? Even though I would make more money, and the money that I made would be more… shall we say, consistent or secure — if I worked full-time, that is a sacrifice I’m willing to make. I’m willing to make less money and forego benefits like dental insurance, health insurance, a 401k matching program, all of that stuff, because I literally could not stand anymore having someone else tell me what to do.

(14:58):
I’ve talked about this on the show before, so I won’t belabor the point, but I got to a point where it was just no longer working for me to have someone else scheduling my time and saying, “Okay, you need to work on this project for this client from this hour to this hour.” It chafed enough that it became a reason for me to make less money — to willingly make less money. This is probably one of those things that is not true for very many people, but I think everybody has that one thing. For me, I could not stand anymore. I couldn’t stand being told what to do or when and how to do it. But for other people, it may be, I want to be able to go on vacation without asking my boss for permission, or I want to choose the clients I work with instead of the ones that are assigned to me, or I want to set my own rates or… insert whatever else reason you may want to work for yourself versus working for someone else. But if it feels justified to you, then it’s justified to you.

(16:06):
It’s just hard to know before you begin what you’ll be giving up, what you’ll be expected to sacrifice. So for me, as a full-time self-employed writer, I am responsible for making money with my writing. On the days that I don’t work, I don’t produce, I don’t make progress on a project, I essentially don’t get paid. There is no going to the water cooler because I don’t have a water cooler, and there’s nobody to talk with at the water cooler (if that’s even something that people do anymore). I don’t know, maybe it’s just part of the cultural workforce zeitgeist or something.

(16:44):
I also didn’t know how difficult it would be to reliably produce high-quality creative stuff on a consistent basis. And what I mean by that is, when I was working full-time, I would go hard on the weekends. I would, on Saturday and Sunday (which were my days off, my weekend), I would have writing marathon days. And all of the writing that I couldn’t do during the week because I was exhausted from work, or I had overextended myself volunteering, or I had done this or that, or I was sick… I was able to write for eight hours a day on Saturday and then Sunday, maybe even more. And that built up the expectation that, oh, if I was a full-time writer, I will be able to do this every day.

(17:32):
And sure, you can do it for the first day and the second day, and then the third day comes and then the fourth day and then the fifth day, and you realize, you begin to realize that energy, creative energy, is a little bit more limited than you thought. And that life tends to eat up your time even though you’ve set it aside for writing. It’s taken me years to fully block off that 7:00 AM to 11:00 AM four-hour period where I am writing and nothing else is allowed to happen.

(18:06):
Time is weirdly relative, and those long eternal minutes that I spent watching the clock go by at a job that I hated was very different from the same amount of time that I spent writing and trying to get in everything I wanted to write that day before my energy ran out, or before something happened that I needed to tend to, et cetera.

(18:30):
I’m not saying any of this to make you second-guess wanting to be a full-time writer. I just want to make sure that you go into it prepared, and that the gap between your expectations and the reality of things doesn’t throw you into disillusionment and despair. So be sure to talk to other writers, because as I said in the beginning, nobody’s writing journey is exactly the same. I can only speak to you about what my experience has been, about what my expectations were for writing full-time. So get a variety of people to tell you about their experience being a writer: the sacrifices they had to make, the things that they didn’t expect, challenges that they didn’t know that they would be dealing with.

(19:18):
Get a list of questions. It doesn’t have to be formal. You can just have an idea of questions in your head. You don’t have to write them down and fill out a worksheet. It’s not that formal. But I do want you to talk to a variety of writers, because my experience is not the only experience, and what I’ve done is not by any means the correct way to do anything. I say this a lot, but there is more than just one way to create, to be an artist, to write, and you need to go with whatever is right for you.

(19:50):
The other reason that I wanted to talk about expectation versus reality for writers today was because of some misleading expectation-setting that I’ve been seeing online. What follows, and really anything in my show, is not meant to slander anyone or to tear anyone down, ever. I just want you to have a discerning eye when it comes to writing advice and when it comes to people telling you what is possible for you in your writing career. Which… that just sounds like a downer, but while I believe that anything is possible for you, it doesn’t happen like magic. It doesn’t happen right away. It doesn’t even happen passively. You have to work hard for these things.

(20:41):
And I’ve been seeing a lot of pieces — I won’t say if they’re essays or articles or podcast episodes or YouTube videos or anything like that, just pieces of media — that seem to suggest that there will ever be a day as a writer when you will not struggle. Again, I know this sounds like a huge bummer, so if you want to turn off this episode, you totally can, but to give you an idea of what I’m talking about, I recently saw a piece aimed at writers that was titled something like “Never Worry About Character Development Again!” “The One Weird Trick That Will Improve Your Writing Instantly!” “Land An Agent With These Three Quick Tips!” “How To Structure The Perfect Story!”

(21:35):
I could go on, but I won’t. These articles and videos and podcast episodes and books and whatever else they are — they’re making false promises. They’re setting false expectations.

(21:50):
Again, I say this from my own experience, but anytime that I have ever come close to saying, “Oh, this is the one right way to structure a story,” I’ve proven myself wrong, or I’ve been proven wrong by someone else, or I’ve just realized that it simply isn’t true. And even if something is a silver bullet or a quick fix in a certain situation, it doesn’t mean that it will work all the time, every time.

(22:17):
I touched on this a little bit in episode 140 about bulletproof writers, and how there is no such thing as a “bulletproof writer”. There is no such thing as a writer who has perfect circumstances, etc., every time they write. There is not “one quick trick” that will “fix” your writing career. There’s basic information that can help you like, “Hey, you should probably spell things correctly unless you’re writing avant-garde poetry, in which case misspell everything,” or, “Hey, you should probably structure your novel in three-act structure, unless of course you realize that three-act structure is actually kind of secretly four-act structure,” — but also there’s five-act structure and seven-act structure and a million other ways to structure a story successfully.

(23:04):
I also hate to be the bearer of this news, and you can choose not to believe it if you want, but there will never be a time when you’re not doubting yourself. Or at least, that’s what has been true for me. Even as I reach a level of success and move forward, I find that I have no idea what I’m doing over and over and over again. Even if I know something is good, there are times when I will doubt it. And anyone promising that in 30 minutes you can overcome self-doubt forever, that you can get rid of imposter syndrome forever, that you’ll never get another book rejection again… those people are setting false expectations. Because there is no cure for self-doubt. There is no cure for imposter syndrome. There is no cure to being human.

(23:57):
I think part of the reason that we write, part of the reason that we create art, is to struggle with these concepts — the frustration that we can’t create something that feels perfect, the frustration that we can’t be perfect even if we understand intellectually what perfect is. This is part of the reason that I haven’t recorded a lot of Write Now episodes lately — it’s because I really hesitate to tell people how to do things, or to assert that “this is the right way to do something,” or “this is the right way to look at something,” because I’ve learned there’s so many valid ways to do and look at things.

(24:34):
Maybe in your experience there has been a silver bullet for overcoming and imposter syndrome forever, in which case, please let us know in the comments below. If you have found a cure for imperfection, if you’ve found a cure for being human, please do let us know — but I do think that part of the reason that we create art is to create the art. It’s not to get to some finish line of perfection that’s light years ahead. It’s not to have become something. It’s to become something. It’s to become a writer.

(25:10):
And even after seven years of doing this full time, I’m only getting started. Becoming something is hard work, and that’s what a lot of people don’t want to admit. Do I love what I do? Yes. Is it a struggle most days? Also, yes. Would I ever go back to doing something else? No, I would not. And that’s part of why I am so strongly committed to writing full-time for myself — because I have had to struggle and sacrifice a lot to get here.

(25:41):
If someone tells you, “Hey, you can overcome imposter syndrome in three quick and easy steps,” I want to take a look at the person who created that article, the source of that statement. Have they truly overcome imposter syndrome? Do they practice what they preach? Do they have proven results?

(26:04):
Sometimes I go back and I look through old episodes of the Write Now Podcast, and I said a lot of things eight, nine years ago that I don’t think I would say anymore. I spoke with very certain authority about things that I only barely understood — about time management, about success, about resistance — so I’m just as guilty of this as anyone else. But I want to make sure that the episodes you’re listening to, that the articles you’re reading, that the books you’re reading, that the videos you’re watching about writing, are not harnessing you with unreasonable expectations with false dreams.

(26:46):
I really shouldn’t keep harping on this, but I attended a webinar over the weekend given by a writer who I really admire, and it was all about how to quit your day job and live your dream as a writer. And 10 years ago, I would have eaten it up — but now that I’ve actually had experience in being a full-time writer, I actually found myself getting a little bit angry. The person leading the webinar was making a lot of promises, and they were saying what the audience wanted to hear, like, “Yes, it is possible for you to live your dream life,” but they were also leaving out a lot of really important things that you need to expect.

(27:31):
Yes, you absolutely can live your dream life, if you have a very specific definition of what your dream life is. Being a writer is not the same thing as being retired. It’s not the same thing as being independently wealthy. (Now, if you’re independently wealthy, if you’re retired, I totally think you should write. That is a great use of your time and I really hope you enjoy that journey.) But if you are looking at writing as a career, I want to encourage you to go into it with fully-open eyes, with questions that you want to ask and need to have answered. Again, my best advice is talk to a variety of writers. Whether it’s a famous writer you admire on social media — you know, famous writers, it’s hit or miss whether they’ll get back to you because they are so busy and inundated with fan mail and stuff — but talk to one of your local news reporters, talk to a journalist, message a lesser known author online, a debut author. Ask them how it’s been going, what their life is like, what their schedule is like, what they didn’t know to expect.

(28:41):
And if anyone ever tells you, “Oh yeah, you can be a writer! You can live your dream! It’s easy!” Then I encourage you to be very, very suspicious. I didn’t know, fully, what to expect until I was in the thick of it when it came to being a full-time writer. And in fact, there’s probably things that I don’t know yet, that I haven’t figured out yet, that I didn’t know to expect, that are still coming down the road. And I never want to say, “Yep! I’ve got it all figured out!” So again, please take the things I’ve said in this episode with the requisite grain of salt.

(29:19):
In the meantime, please keep writing in your free time. If writing is something you truly enjoy, then make sure that you are making time to do it. If you want to swim with dolphins, don’t become a marine biologist. Save up your money and take a vacation where you can swim with some dolphins. If you want to sit in your local coffee shop on Saturday mornings and write your novel, then please do that. And if you want to write full-time, then please prepare yourself as best you can, so that the gap between your expectation and your reality doesn’t crush you.

(29:58):
Writing is a journey, and as Morpheus very wisely said to Neo, “There’s a difference between knowing the path and walking the path.” And if you decide that you want to walk the path, I want you to know that I’m right here with you, walking, and maybe tripping and stumbling, but always willing to get back up, and dust myself off, and give you a hand up if you need it, too.

(30:26):
I am able to create the Write Now podcast because of the kind and generous people who donate on Patreon. Patreon is a secure third-party donation platform that allows you to donate a dollar per podcast episode, or $3 per podcast episode, or even more if you like. You can support me on Patreon by following the link in the show notes to today’s episode — this is episode 159 — and just click “support this podcast,” and it will take you out to Patreon, where you can make your pledge. Otherwise, if you are not a fan of Patreon, if you want to do something else, I also do have links to Ko-fi and… PayPal, I think? that you can find, also in the show notes for today’s episode. If you’re looking for the show notes for today’s episode, you can find them out at sarah werner dot com — that’s S-A-R-A-H-W-E-R-N-E-R dot com. There will be not only the audio, but also a full transcript for every single episode of the show out there to make it as accessible as possible for as many people as possible.

(31:34):
Thank you, especially to patrons, Laurie, Regina Calabrese, Amber Fratesi, Charmaine Ferreira, Mike Tefft, Poppy Brown, Summer, Tiffany Joyner, and Whitney MacGruder. These amazing, generous people keep this show going, so thank you all so very much. Again, if you would like to donate to keep the show going, follow the links in the show notes for today’s episode.

(32:03):
… Sorry, I almost forgot what I’m saying, so maybe it’s just that kind of day. I hope that this episode has been useful for you. If you have dreams of becoming a writer, then I’m right there with you, and wanting those dreams to come true. Grow your understanding of what to expect, of what the reality of your dream may be, so that you can prepare yourself for it and succeed.

(32:31):
And with that, this has been episode 159 of the Write Now Podcast, the podcast that hopefully 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’ve got some writing to do.