I was feeling mildly bitter about how I wasn’t able to advance my writing career before I turned 39. You know the situation: I meet a brilliant new writer; I find out they’re 25; I hate myself, and by extension, I hate capitalism and the decade I spent struggling just to stay alive. I assume, bitterly, that this 25 year-old didn’t have to do that, but I don’t really know.
I shake myself, asking, “What can you do? What can you change? Not the past. All you can do is help others in the same situation.”
Well, what can I do to help the writers out there who are like me at 25, struggling to quiet their unending financial worries and start to write?
What can I do? Well, donate to Literary Cleveland’s scholarship fund, of course. But also, I can write this blog post.
So this blog post is intended for aspiring writers who are struggling to get by financially. Feel free to forward it to your favorite working-class niece or neighbor who carries around a spiral notebook they won’t let anyone else see.
Accept that this is hard
Yes, it is far, far easier to be a published author if you are wealthy enough not to worry about making rent. Yes, there are thousands of wealthy-enough people gobbling up all the publishing contracts and it can feel like the industry is going to tank any day now, anyway, but I’ve got good news: they never run out of publishing. Every year we make more.
And it’s not a race. You absolutely can start your career full tilt in your forties like I did. Give yourself time to find a good job. I swear those are also things that exist, and new ones do get made all the time. No, not real good jobs, but good enough jobs. For me it was help desk. That job was hell, but it paid enough to have more than zero in the bank at the end of the month, and while it didn’t feel like it at a time, that twenty dollars at the end of the month did build up into able-to-afford-nice-apartment, and then I got the BETTER job of network technician because of people I met as a help desk technician.
I know… I know… it doesn’t look possible where you are. It’s probably a lot harder today than it was when I was twenty, but I’m telling you – the thing I needed when I was working three minimum wage jobs and zeroing out my bank account after buying my bus pass every month – the thing I needed was to know that this will NOT be forever. Every job applied for is a lotto ticket, and the odds in lotteries suck, but if you buy infinite tickets, you have to make it, right?
(Related: DO NOT BUY LOTTO TICKETS. That’s a tax on people who can’t do math. You’re paying enough in sales tax already.)
Hang in there, buddy. Look for new jobs constantly, while you are employed. You’ll find something. Yes, that means you don’t have time to write.
Watering the lawn in a drought
You don’t have to write the brilliant novel that’s going to break you in now. You just have to keep yourself able to write. A friend compared it to watering her lawn during a drought – you aren’t aiming for green grass, you are aiming for “the brown grass is alive at the roots, so it can come back when the water comes back.”
Don’t beat yourself up. Write to relax. Write fanfic, if that motivates you. Or a diary. Or whatever feels low-effort. This really is practice you can use. Every day you play with words, even if just in your head while waiting for the bus, you are a writer.
Do Not Write 1,000 Words a Day
When I was super broke and had no brain space, I wrote longhand in a spiral notebook by my bed. I tried to force myself to do 1,000 words a day. This was a stupid idea. Why? Because I rarely had the brainpower to reach 1,000, and no, filling half a page with “blah, blah, blah” did not produce a meaningful benefit. The self-loathing and self-punishment I meted out for not meeting the goal wasn’t worth any potential benefit.
Past me should have, rather, just set a goal of opening that notebook every day. Maybe re-reading a bit. Maybe writing a sentence. Maybe writing three or four. On the days that I had a genuine nugget for a story, a good sentence I thought of while standing behind a cash register, that one sentence was more important to write down than a page full of arbitrary words.
It’s easy to fall into this idea of toxic productivity, and use it as a bludgeon on yourself. As lower-income kids, our parents were constantly drilling into us this need to over-achieve. “You need to get straight A’s or you’ll never go to college!” was a constant refrain in our house.
Much like our parents were wrong, or were exaggerating the scholarship requirements, the amount of productivity you need to eventually be productive is not as much as you think.
One sentence. Or a fragment. Water that parched lawn a tiny bit, just a dribble, in the dark.
Fill Your Future Trunk
It’s okay to let this time be about practice.
Journal. Journal boring shit. What you ate for breakfast and how you cooked dinner. What your commute was like. Life is in the boring shit, and so is fiction. You’ll have to set a setting, a theme, a character some day. You’ll have to decide what they’re doing when the Martians attack, or when they meet the love of their life, and your everyday details will sell that scene as authentic.
Make Lists for Future You
The best advice I got was from my college fiction professor, Mary Grimm, who said she couldn’t write when she started teaching, so she made a list of “story ideas” and every now and then she’d think of one and write it down. “Now I haven’t written anything, but I have 59 story ideas, and that feels like something.”
I did that. And I still do. Someday when you feel energized, when you want to write, you can look over the list and find something to use as a prompt. (Don’t beat yourself up if only 1/10th of the story ideas in your list get used. I probably use 1/100th.)
Find Low Cost Ways to Join the Community
Online groups are a good one, as are free library workshops.
You don’t have a lot of time right now, but maybe it feels good to read other people’s posts on a website, or find an anonymous friend who shares the same fanfiction loves. There are lots of small, niche Discord servers out there. Or Meetups. One will lead to another. I found the online science fiction writer’s workshop, and from them found Codex, a group for “emerging” writers who have at least one semi-pro sale. (I had one semi-pro sale!) These groups gave me support when I was flailing, and cost nothing, since I already had internet I could access at work. (Well, it does cost time… I ended up dropping out of the online workshop because I had no time to keep up. Related to the above: don’t beat yourself up if you don’t have time for community. This can come after that good-ish job, right?)
The fellow-struggling-nobody you meet today may be your fellow-aspiring-author-with-a-few-sales in ten years. Don’t be discouraged if it feels like your friends are on the fast track and leaving you behind. Imagine how you’ll recall this time after you are big and famous. Be grateful for the coattails your friends grow.
All of this is Optional
Maybe you can’t write a little each day. Maybe you can’t join the community online. Maybe none of this helps you, but I’m hoping at least one thing will. If you take nothing else from this blog post take these words:
Don’t beat yourself up!
You are worthwhile. You are as human as anyone with a billion dollars. Probably moreso. You matter. You will survive. Your situation is hard enough, stop blaming yourself for it. You don’t need the extra weight with what you’re already carrying.
I hope this helps.
