Writing “Full Time”

Last week, I wrote a post entitled Words Written vs. Words Used, which was partly a craft discussion and partly a window into my insane obsession with numbers and statistics. I received a comment this morning that included a question I started to reply to, but as my answer grew lengthier, I decided to just make it a full-on post. In the comment, Jonathan asks:

Before you were able to write full time, were your benchmarks different? how much time did you devote to writing while you carried a FT day job?

Here’s the really messed up thing: When I had a full-time day job, my quota was exactly the same. I had to produce 1,000 words a day, no excuses. I wrote on my commute, typing on the tiny keyboard of my smartphone. I wrote at lunch. I got home in the evening, had dinner with my wife and allowed myself an hour of TV, then went back to work. Make no mistake, a novel done right requires countless hours of work and the sacrifice of a lot of personal/social time. If you’re serious about it, you need to commit to it even if it means you’re tired all the time from staying up until 2am writing, or have to tell your friends/family/spouse that you can’t do that thing with them because you need to stay home and write on Sunday.

Of course, like a lot of new authors, I thought I all this would change when I wrote full time. I would produce more and reclaim all that free time I had been forced to give up.

Ah, naivete…

I thought I could calculate my new productivity simply by multiplying the spare hours I had used for writing by the additional hours in the work day, but it doesn’t work like that. I soon discovered two things: One was that being a full time author requires a LOT of paperwork. Sales contracts. Editing. Endless tax forms. Figuring out healthcare. Editing. Doing interviews, con appearances, and promotion. Editing. Debating cover art and copy. Blogging.

Taking care of the business aspects of your career, even when you have a great agent like I do, eats up a good chunk of that newfound free time. But even if it didn’t, the other thing I discovered is that just as important as the writing itself is time spend thinking about what you are going to write later. When I had a full-time day job full of mindless tasks, I had plenty of time to ponder the direction of my story, solve plot problems, and sometimes even craft prose in my head to write down later, so that when I found time to actually write, I had a good roadmap of what I wanted to do and could plow ahead.  Those hours still have to come from somewhere.

Don’t get me wrong. I am overjoyed that I have the opportunity to write full-time, at least for now. It’s especially wonderful since it allows me to be around my 11 week old daughter all the time, but that’s a whole other time sink…

Posted on October 14, 2008 at 11:31 am by PeatB
Filed under Craft, Writing
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