Writing Full Time – WN 065

This is The Write Now Podcast with Sarah Werner, Episode 65: Writing Full Time.

Welcome to Write Now, the podcast that helps you find the time, energy, and courage you need to pursue your passion and write every day. I’m your host, Sarah Werner. And yeah, it’s been a while. Oh, I’m so sorry about that. So you may have noticed the last time that I did one of these solo episodes or as one listener calls it, the prime episodes, it was September 2017. And the very last episode I recorded for you was called How To Rest As A Writer, episode 64 of the Write Now podcast. And I kind of wonder if some of you maybe thought that I started resting and never stopped, like I went on vacation and just never came back. But don’t worry, I would not do that to you because I care about this show and I care about you and your writing journey. So I’m back today to kind of talk about what I’ve learned in the six months that I have been away. And yes, I had to pause to count the months because math is not my strong suit.

So September 2017 marks not only the last episode of Write Now in a recent memory, it also marks the launch of my new show Girl In Space. You can kind of see a little bit of a correlation and causation there. I launched a fictional podcast. It’s a sci-fi, audio drama, mystery fictional show called girl in space, which you can find out on iTunes and at girlinspacepodcast.com. It’s about a girl in space, it’s kind of self-explanatory. And basically, what I wanted to do was experiment a little bit with this medium of podcasting that I’ve come to love and see what I could do fiction wise in it. We’ve talked a little bit on the show about sort of the challenges and difficulties with publishing, both self publishing and traditional publishing, and I kind of wanted to experiment with doing something new with fiction. And so I launched the Girl In Space podcast, September 2017, and it kind of took off in a good way, but also in a way that I was completely unprepared for.

This might sound weird, but I’m going to give 90% of the credit to you. Yes, you, the listener of the right now podcast, because so many of you wonderful folks just jumped right on the bandwagon and began listening to Girl In Space right when it launched so thank you. But what happened was, it somehow made its way onto the front page of iTunes and it kind of exploded. I got many, many, many downloads and was ranked very highly. And if you’ll recall from just a few minutes ago, I said, this all started as an experiment and I had actually intended it to fail. I was just kind of trying to live out my mantra, fail a lot, and there’s a whole Write Now episode dedicated to purposefully failing. And that’s what I did, and it ended up being my purposeful failure turned into an accidental success.

So yeah. So I’ve been churning out episodes since September 2017. Each one, I write the full script. Each script is about 30 pages, which equals about 30 minutes per show, give and take based on how many lines there are and how many special effects need to happen and how much weird, awkward silence there needs to be for it to be successful, dramatic storytelling. It takes me about a week to write each script and to write it well, you know me, I like to make sure that I’m doing a good job. I handed over to my husband, Tim, for script editing and he does a wonderful job making me sound a little less like I’m flying by the seat of my pants. And then I get together my voice actors and we record. They get their lines to me and I edited all together. And that editing, whew that editing, all told with the writing and the coordination and communication and at the editing, it takes me between 40 and 80 hours to create one 30-minute episode of Girl in Space. Yeah.

So I’m doing that in addition to website building, marketing consulting, public speaking and ghost writing. So you can perhaps imagine that I’ve maybe been just a little bit busy, but not too busy for you. I promise, I promise I’m not too busy for you. I did faithfully keep on producing Coffee Break episodes for you. So hopefully you found some really good nuggets of wisdom within the Coffee Break episodes. And once again, for those of you who are maybe just joining us, this is your first episode, and it’s probably a weird experience for you and I apologize for that. Those are my interviews. So I find all sorts of amazing, cool writerly folks, and I talked to them about creativity and writing and the struggles and the challenges and the awesome rewards that they get to face. And so yeah, I have an entire large back catalog of those. If you’d like to check them out, they’re right here in my RSS feed or out at sarahWerner.com, that’s S-A-R-A-H-W-E-R-N-E-R.com.

So yeah, that’s kind of what I’ve been up to in a nutshell. If you’ll recall, I left my full-time day job in April 2017, and since then I’ve been sort of making money by doing those things I mentioned earlier, website building, marketing, consulting, ghost writing and public speaking. But that’s really what I want to focus on today is what it looks like to really write full time, to pursue a professional creative career. For many of us, this is something that we’ve dreamed about for years. I have dreamed about being a Writer, full time, writer with a capital W. Since I was a little girl, I was writing my own books at that time. I was illustrating my own books, and I had these dreams of what it was like to be a full-time writer.

And with those dreams came a new image of myself, a different image of myself. I would be somebody who was creating things that mattered. I was going to be someone who, because apparently I live in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast land, when I step out of my house, everyone would start singing, “Oh, there goes that girl who writes novels and loves books,” and is beloved by the town as she sings across the marketplace. I don’t even know what I’m talking about right now. But we all have this image in our head of what it means to be a writer, to live into the title of writer and to have that be our primary career, our primary definer of who we are and what we do with our life.

As I grew a little bit older, I went to high school, I went to college, I graduated, I began working for jobs so that I could pay off my student loans, because that’s fun and exciting and necessary. And my idea of what it meant to be a writer full time, changed a little bit. And I’m not sure it became more realistic because it was a little bit less Beauty and the Beast and a little bit more Instagram. And what I mean by that is social media really started becoming a thing after I graduated college, depending on how old you are, you may or may not be able to identify with that. But nevertheless, that’s the reality for me. And I began to get a very intimate view into what other writers lives looked like or, and this is the important part, how other writers portrayed their lives.

So right now, if you look at the #ImWriting on Instagram, or if you even just follow writers or aspiring writers on any sort of social media, be it Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, whatever new thing now exists that I don’t know about at the time you are listening to this, you might notice some really beautiful, lovely and fantastical elements. This is what really drew me in, and this is also for better or for worse what shaped my expectation of what a writer’s life could be and should be. I went through Instagram and I saw beautiful laptop setups, beautiful desks in beams of sunlight or antique desks set up in front of a window with beads of rain dripping beautifully down and in a single pink rose in a vase on that desk, or a writer sitting at their desk with a cat curled up in their lap and a mug of cocoa or tea or coffee in their hand, as they smile dreamily at what will surely be their best selling novel on screen. Does any of this sound familiar yet? If not, I’ll keep going.

There are also visions out there of writers and mansions. There’s the J.K. Rowlings and the Stephen Kings whose creative professional lives have built up these beautiful estates and successful lifestyles and glamorous lifestyles. And then there’s this other image that I want to talk about a little bit too. I read the most beautiful article on Lit Hub the other day, and I’ll link to it in the show notes for today’s episode. But the article is called Let’s Talk About the Fantasy of the Writer’s Lifestyle and it’s written by a novelist named Rosalie Knecht, and I really hope I’m pronouncing that correctly. Again, I’ll link to that in the show notes for today’s episode, but I want to read you a very brief excerpt that really, really hits upon some of my expectations for what a writer’s life could and should be.

So here’s a brief passage for you. Rosalie writes, “If I were speaking to my 14-year old self who had already fully assimilated the writer lifestyle fantasy from various sources, I would say this: First of all, good news. You’re going to write books. Second, you’re going to spend very little time on terraces or piazzas of any kind. There will be vintage tilework in your future, but it will be the lavender and black extravaganza of your circa-1986 bathroom in Queens. Your train travel will mostly take place on New Jersey Transit, which is nothing to sneeze at if you’ve ever enjoyed the views over the swamps of Secaucus, or criss-crossing the Delaware River on the way to Philadelphia. There will be cafes with huge flaking mirrors, because this is New York, but you won’t linger in them long because all the tables will be taken by people on laptops.

“When you stay up too late and sleep through your writing time, it will be because you were watching Bob’s Burgers online, not carousing with jazz musicians. In fact, carousing will lose most of its appeal when you move to a train line that goes local after 10:30 PM. The important thing is, though, that you will get to write.” This article spoke to me so much. The author talks about sort of this anthropology catalogs style writer’s life where you’re in this big crumbling house and you’re in a house coat that’s dripping with lace and fringe, and you’re waltzing around imagining how your novel will end. And it’s really beautiful. And it’s something the thing that I think a lot of us aspire to, and it’s something that I think that we keep in our minds, locked away protected as this beautiful, safe haven that we as writers can look forward to someday.

I like that she also tempers a little bit and maybe to you, that was disappointing. I mean, to me, it is realistic and it was disappointing, and I’m not even in New York, at least she’s in New York or Philadelphia. I’m in South Dakota. And while I love South Dakota very dearly and I don’t ever want to leave, it is not exactly what I imagined as the glamorous hub of a writing lifestyle. So together, this is when we enter expectation versus reality. I love talking about expectations versus reality not because I like enjoying crushing people’s spirits, because that’s pretty much the opposite of everything I stand for. I want your spirit to be healthy and happy. I want you to love writing and I don’t want you to be disappointed, but at the same time, I don’t want to set you up for an expectation of reality that will likely not happen, or that won’t happen in the way that you think or expect it will.

Right now, I am writing full-time and I love it, but there are a lot of things that I didn’t even know to expect. I didn’t expect that it would be hard, which is really stupid because any of you who have written anything before know that it’s hard, but I thought suddenly when I became a Writer with a capital W full-time that the writing would get easy. I don’t know where that came from, that was not a realistic expectation. If anything, it gets harder because all of a sudden what you’re doing is how you make your rent money or how you buy groceries or how you support your family. And that’s not to say that you can’t do it. It just adds a little bit extra pressure. You don’t think about the fact that as a citizen of the United States, at least 33% of every dollar you make will go to taxes, which you will have to pay at the end of the year. You don’t think about the fact that you might get extremely bored writing day after day.

Even if you’re writing something you love, it can get a little tedious. It can get a little frustrating. And like Rosalie Knecht said in her article, you might not be at one of those beautiful crumbling, antique desks, looking out at the river as rain patters gently against the window, and you smile coyly sipping your hot cocoa or tea or coffee. You might be sitting in a dumpy, half painted office in the middle of Montana or South Dakota or Texas or Nebraska. You might be writing in a coffee shop that’s full of screaming children and their mothers who look exhausted. You might even be trying to squeeze in an hour of writing over your lunch break as you transition or begin to think about transitioning out of your full-time job.

My point once again is not to discourage or distress you. If you heard all of those downsides and you’re still like, “Oh my gosh, Sarah, I still want to do this anyway,” good for you, because at the end of the day, it’s worth it. It’s worth it to know that, “Yeah, I’m creating my own thing. Nobody can tell me what hours to work.” Even though again, expectation wise, I probably am working way more than I ever did when I was “full time” at my advertising agency. I work about 12 hours a day, but again, it’s on stuff that I want to work on, so something to think about there. If all of that sounds like something you can bear because you’re writing full-time, good for you.

I’m going to talk a little bit about how I made my own transition and give you kind of four pointers that might be able to help you in your transition, or that might help you establish a little bit more of a realistic expectation so you know what you’re getting into which is important, so that you’re not disappointed when those fantasies maybe don’t come true in the way that you expected or wanted them to.

All right. So number one, prioritize your writing, that’s the starting point. That’s the point at which you decide to take your writing seriously. And it moves from sort of a hobby that you can push to the side to a necessary thing that you need to do at least four times a week or whatever you set for yourself. And yes, that’s amidst to the day job, that’s amidst to the family work, the social obligations, the kids, the whatever else you have going on in your life. Prioritizing your writing, taking it seriously, and knowing that you actually want to work toward it as a full time job as a career, as a living, you’ve got to take it seriously. So define what that means for you. What does take taking your writing seriously? What does prioritizing your writing look like for you? Is it sacrificing an hour and a half of sleep and getting up an hour and a half earlier than usual to get your writing in? Is it making sure that you write every day over your lunch break? Think about what that means for you.

The next thing that you’re going to want to do, number two, is make connections. And I know I’ve talked about this before, there’s an episode of the Write Now podcast that you can go back and listen to that’s called Networking For Writers. I suggest you listen to it and take the pointers and lessons in there fully to heart. Go to our conference, go to a convention, join a writing community, look for local marketing agencies in your town that are maybe looking to hire on content marketers, look for freelance opportunities in your community, and the key here is to let people know that you are looking for freelance writing opportunities. This all goes back to building your own personal brand, again, which we’ve talked about before in a previous episode of the Write Now podcast and again, which I would recommend that you listen to, building your personal brand and marketing yourself as a freelance writer.

It’s very easy to say, “Oh, hey, I’m going to start doing freelance writing,” and sit back in your chair and just wait for the phone to ring or the emails to start coming in. Nobody’s going to know to call or email you unless they know you’re available in looking for freelance writing jobs. So make sure that you are making yourself visible as a writer. And that could mean telling your current coworkers, which you may or may not want to do, depending on if you want people to know that you’re thinking of leaving your full-time job or your part-time job or what have you. Market yourself, make connections. Maybe it is telling people at the local library, maybe it’s making a stop into your local newspaper, maybe it is blogging more frequently, maybe it’s taking out Google Ads, maybe it’s posting on Facebook, “Hey, friends. I really want to get into freelance writing as a side gig or a side hustle. Maybe send anyone who’s looking for this my way,” maybe it’s signing up on ProBlogger and working your way up from there, whatever that looks like for you, make connections.

Heck, maybe for you, this means attending a dreaded networking event in your area and just saying, “Hey, I’m looking into getting into freelance writing. I’m offering a 15% discount or a 30% discount since I’m new and I’m trying to build my name. Here’s my business card, please give me a call,” whatever that looks like for you, make connections. Let people know that you are taking yourself seriously as a writer and that you are looking to get paid for your work.

Number three is build your runway. So this was something that I had not even thought about before joining a mastermind group. And I had Lets, one of the folks in my mastermind group, know that I was thinking about leaving my day job and writing full-time and he said, “Great, what’s your runway?” And I said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, “How much money do you need to be able to live comfortably for about three months and pay your bills, pay rent, buy food and groceries without relying on your full-time day job to support you? And I was like, “Oh, I don’t have one of those.” The lesson there is don’t leap right away. So what you don’t want to do is give your two weeks notice at your job, without any savings built up, without any cushion in your bank account and saying, “Wee I’m a freelance writer now,” and then sitting there in silence as your bills stack up in your mailbox. That’s horrifying, please don’t do that.

Jeff Goins has a fantastic article and it’s something about you can make the leap, just don’t make it thoughtlessly. Don’t make it without planning a runway for your plane to take off. What I recommend doing is write down your expenses for one month, and so take a look at that. What is your income? What does childcare look like for you? Groceries, rent, all of those necessary things, what do those look like expense wise for a month? And then maybe plan out three or four months, that will be your runway. Also, what you’ll need to do is figure in things that your job might be taken care of for you already like healthcare so you’ll need to look into what independent healthcare costs look like, or maybe look into joining your parents or your spouse’s health care plans.

And then also, and this was the real kicker for me, is adding in an extra 33%. You’re going to have to pay lots of taxes, so if you have a steady paycheck now, those taxes may be automatically taken out and so for me, that’s what happened. And so I was like, “Oh, I actually need to open up a separate bank account, and if I make $400 on a job…” Oh, that was a terrible example because $133 of that needs to go immediately into my tax account, leaving me with much less money than I thought I would have at my disposal. So make sure you are accounting for all of those things, build your runway, make sure that you have things that you need taken care of, like health insurance, taxes, all of that good stuff, and make sure that you’re really, really thinking about that before you put in your two weeks, notice that your job.

Finally, this is a small thing, but I think that it’s important. Number four is don’t burn any bridges. It’s really, really, really tempting, once you have your runway built up, to say, “See you dorks,” and burn a bridge as you leave your place of employment for what you think will be the last time. Don’t do that, leave graciously. Even if you’ve had a terrible experience, thank your employers, say, “Hey, it’s been great. I’m really excited about this new chapter in my life, but I’m thankful for everything that I have learned here.” Please, please do that. Do not say, “So long suckers, I hate you all,” because we’re word gets out, especially in a community. Even if you feel like you’re in a larger or smaller community, word gets out. Protect your reputation. Those people might want to contact you later for some freelance writing. They might have friends that they say like, “Oh, that’s Sarah. When she left, she sure was a jerk.”

So essentially, if you are writing full-time, you are a business owner, you are a full-time business owner. Do not start off your new found writing career with a bad reputation for your business. It will only bite you in the bum. So those are my four sort of tips for establishing a realistic way to sort of launch yourself into a full-time writing career. If you’re thinking about doing this, I’m really excited for you. Like I said, it’s been a ton of hard work, but it’s work that I love and it’s work that makes my life feel more worthwhile, and so I want you to take that to heart. I would also love to hear about your own plans or field any questions that you might have about writing full-time. You can email me at hello@sarahWerner.com. That’s just H-E-L-L-O @ S-A-R-A-H-W-E-R-N-E-R.com. Alternately, you can go to my website, click the contact page and fill out the little form there, that will also go right to my email inbox.

Let’s see, it’s been a while so I’m like, “Oh, what else am I supposed to say here?” Oh, I also have a Facebook group that’s free to join. Boy, I think it’s just you have to answer one very simple question just so that we know you’re not a robot. It’s called, I am a writer and I’ll have a link to it in the show notes for today’s episode. But basically if you want, you can join that community. It’s a great starting place for writers who are maybe looking to connect with other writers and maybe find some opportunities and network with other writers. I also plan going forward to do some live streams to that group. And so if you want to do live stream Q and A with me, I’m going to be talking about how to write full-time and answering any questions that you might have live in that video chat.

So yeah. So join the group, make sure you answer the question. Otherwise, I can’t let you in because I don’t know if you’re a robot, so let me know you’re not a robot. But join that group. I’ll have some live streams coming up, which I’m kind of nervous about because I’m not a video person, but I want to be, so this is going to be like training wheels for me too so… Oh, my gosh. I am so glad that I am talking to you again. I am so glad to once again, be recording right now, podcast episodes. I’m so grateful for this opportunity. Thank you for listening. Thank you for sticking with me. Thank you for not giving up on me and leaving because I think that we were just going to get bigger and better from here. We’re just going to keep growing together and we’re going to keep writing together, and it’s going to be amazing.

Speaking of thank yous, wow, I want to say a really big thank you to those of you on Patreon who are still supporting the right now podcast despite my little sad hiatus. You are wonderful. Thank you for not giving up on me. I have special, special thanks today to Patreon supporters, Elise Jane Tabor, Rebecca Werner, Sean Locke, Shelley Perrin, Gary Medina, Lilith Black and Kaitlin Herron. You are all so wonderful. You are literally helping me pay my bills and produce this show and pay for hosting and the website costs and all of that so thank you so, so, so much. If you, yes, you, listener, would like to help support me, help support my life as a full-time writer, this is part of it, this podcast is part of it, and Patreon is a big part of it as well, you can go out to sarahWerner.com and find the show notes for this episode and click, help support the show and it should take you out to Patreon.

Otherwise, you can go out to patreon.com, that’s P-A-T-R-E-O-N.com/sararheawerner, that’s S-A-R-A-H-R-H-E-A-W-E-R-N-E-R, all one word and click the pledge button. You can pledge a dollar in episode, $2 in episode, $700 million per episode, whatever you feel is right and affordable and comfortable for you. And gosh, I would appreciate that so much. So again, I’m out on Patreon. You can find me there at Sarah Rhea Werner and you should see the Write Now podcast logo right there so you know you’re in the right place. If you choose to do that, thank you. I’ll give you a shout out on Twitter and I will fulfill all the ends of my bargains, so to speak for the rewards for whatever level you pledge. So thank you again to my Patreon supporters. You’re wonderful.

And with that, I have a Write Now Podcast – Coffee Break interview coming up in about three minutes here so I should probably stop rambling and let you get back to writing. Gosh, I’m so glad to be here with you again. Thank you so much for listening today. Happy writing and I’m looking forward to speaking with you again very soon. With that, this has been episode 65 of the Write Now podcast, the podcast that helps aspiring writers and all writers to find the time, energy and courage you need to pursue your passion and write every day. I’m Sarah Werner, and I know you can do this.