I am a student who writes and loves to do so. And now, I am facing The Decision of my life, i.e., Which College? What Course? And I wanted to know if it is worth it. To be a writer, full time. I am and will always be a writer, despite my choices, but I want to know if being a writer full time will be pay me enough to live. And I have heard a lot of people who tell me to put my brain into the Science Department rather than spin lies. As a creative professional, what would you advice?
Dear writer-birds-sanctuary,
It’s funny — funny strange, maybe, rather than funny ha ha — to think that I am technically a full time writer, because I am also not. The most accurate description is actually: the majority of my income is from my writing.
I don’t think that I am a full-time writer, though.
I don’t even really know what I would do if that was true, if most of my time was spent actively writing or story-making. I would run out of things to write about. I would write the same story and people over and over again with different names and different settings. I would create unhealthy goals for myself of ever bigger sales or more awards in writing, because if writing was my sole and most important path, I would do nothing but try to improve myself in that department year after year.
But I don’t think I am a full-time writer, although I am a professional writer. I have a music studio and an art studio, and I consider myself equally a musician and artist. I am mad about cars, and spend a decent amount of time in motorsports or just fucking around in mine or other people’s. I’m raising two strange children. I live on a farm. I have taken up occasional blacksmithing.
That is what I am, full-time.
And then I write about it, and am paid for it. This doesn’t mean that this writing doesn’t occupy quite a bit of my time on the pie chart of my weeks. But if you were to take one of these things away: the music, the art, the writing — well, if I was only a writer, there wouldn’t be anything to me. If it was some sort of faustian bargain, I’d give up the writing and find something else to do for money. Writing’s a byproduct, a synthesis of the rest of my life. My uncanny family and my close friends lead me to write the Raven Cycle. My love of cars leads me to write for Jalopnik and Road & Track. My memories of what it was like to be a struggling, ambitious teen lead me to write this answer.
I guess what I’m saying is don’t put the horse behind the carriage. Follow your passion, and then write about the emotional truth of that. If you love biology, study the hell out of that, then infuse your novels with it. Don’t worry that you’ll suffer by not majoring in English (I majored in History and took zero writing classes)(I also wrote zero words of fiction while in college, but still had a writing career by 26). There are other ways to learn to write novels and my professional writing friends are evenly split in having a writing degree versus not. If you don’t love biology, only like it … maybe major in it anyway.
Because you will be poor.
A very few authors manage to not be poor straight out of the gate, but most have to scrape their way up over five years, ten years. I was one of the scrapers, writing on the side while making my living as a portrait artist. I’m not very good about writing when I am also fretting about money — it makes me slow, and also resentful of whatever it is I’m writing — and so for me, I’d rather put the burden of urgently paying my bills on something that is not my current novel. Nowadays that means that my past novels are paying my mortgage while my current project is paying future bills. But back then, it meant I was happier having another job while I worked out getting published.
And, I mean, biologist sounds like a good job.
This has gotten very long and it’s all saying essentially the same thing: don’t let WRITER be your identity, even if WRITING is your ultimate job. Don’t conflate FOLLOW YOUR DREAMS with IGNORE COMMON SENSE. Don’t believe that somehow putting aside your writing to get a degree in Zebra Husbandry means you have abandoned your true self. Don’t think about a ticking clock, think only about forward movement. Pursue whatever degree will give you that balance of identity, security, and vivid creative material. Only you can answer which degree fills in that blank.
P.S. College really is not the Decision of Your Life and it makes me sad that this is the biggest lie we’ve told Millennials. College can be intensely meaningful, or intensely not … it’s like high school. Just a handful of years with ever so many more years of life that come after it, plenty of time to change your stars or erase its value or harm or mediocrity. In the end, it didn’t matter where I went to college. I have friends who were shaped by theirs. Don’t give it more emotional weight than it deserves.
amandla
theartofmadeline
izzy806
kianamaiart
tangentwithtanner
sugurugetos
origamiaround
areudirty
