Day 25: Do it for love not fame

Day 25
x mins journal + 30 mins editing + 15 mins planning

+ 1 hr planned writing

The tone today is realism. While it is good — perhaps essential — to be aspirational, it is necessary to balance that with an understanding that we are not entitled to success. Or, in Jacqui’s words, “the literary world does not owe us a living”.

I agree. It is important to find a way to separate one’s motivation to write from the vicissitudes of the marketplace. Because otherwise we get discouraged, or encouraged, too easily. If we enjoy the writing process — and by “enjoy” I also mean embrace the hard work — then we continue to create for the sake of creating, and hopefully for the people who want that sort of work.

Journal

Today we are asked to consider how we might continue to support ourselves financially as we devote ourselves to our writing craft. It’s important to think about the reality of writing, and how to finance it, as a way of increasing our feeling of commitment.

But I find it notable that Jacqui has formulated it as giving up writing time to find income, rather than giving up income to find writing time. She talks about taking a sabbatical to do a course in creative writing, and how she was able to begin her writing career on the back of that. I’m impressed. But everyone I know who’s decided to pursue a currently-unpaid interest has started from working full time in an unrelated field. I wonder what the target audience is for this guide; either people who are very financially secure, or the very bold!

My answer to Jacqui’s question about how I’m going to support myself financially through writing is “balance and sustainability.” If I cannot feel confidence in my arrangement then I am never going to feel relaxed enough to be creative. There needs to be a base level of maintenance before I can engage in the task of making things up. At the same time, I want writing to be an expectation, something which feels weird not to do. That is the only way that I will produce enough — and of a quality — to make it a commercial enterprise.

I am self-employed and I try to organise my work so that I do business things in the morning, and writing in the afternoon. I don’t always honour that — and it still easier for my brain to say yes to business-related activities than creative. However, I am getting better at keeping the times distinct. This is the first year that I have tried to. Previously, I said I would do writing “at some point”, which tended to mean either i) never or ii) in an unsustainable block for days at a time while I neglected everything else.

Exercise

  • Journal: how to support myself financially while writing is something I think about all the time, so I skipped this journal entry.
  • 1,500 words (I added 30 mins editing + 15 minutes planning): write a whole scene like a short story, so that we are brought to an “end” with a sense that something has changed.

My response

  • I decided to do the rest of this novel draft linearly, picking up from an early scene and continuing the story as if I know what’s going to happen.
  • In my “short story” scene, two characters met for the first time and toured an art gallery. They sized each other up, via a chat about painting. I found it fairly easy to imagine — resigned as I am now to this first draft being uninformed filler — but whoa, writing 1,500 words was disproportionately harder than 1,000.

all course content copyright Jacqui Lofthouse thewritingcoach.co.uk

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