We long for that opportunity, don’t we? To write for x number of hours a day, then get some exercise and perhaps make the occasional public appearance. Not too many though.
Someone described it last weekend as writing in your bedroom and pushing the manuscript under the door and waiting for the cheque to be pushed back in the other direction. We’d all like that. It just doesn’t happen.
Not even if you write a bestseller. Because even a bestseller doesn’t sell forever and then because you have to go on tour to stretch its selling potential you have to be disciplined enough to do your writing on the train and in the hotel room. Or grab ten minutes like I am now.
Until you achieve that bestseller, you have to do something else. Great, if like me, you can have a job where you are employed because you are a writer. A lot of my activities include editing and critiquing and that actually enhances my writing as well.
An then there is something else.
If you are just in that bubble of writing might you not run out of things to write about? Doesn’t the rest of your life feed your writing? And of course the life around you that you observe.
The story-tellers of days gone by were often employed in other capacities, too. By day they might be hunters or fishermen, in the evenings they told their stories.
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