6 Things You MUST Do to Make Writing Your Career
By: Gwenna Laithland
Tags: Authors, Writing, Work, Careers, Writer

6 Things You MUST Do to Make Writing Your Career

How to Make Your Writing More Than a Hobby

Photo by rawpixel.com from Pexels

When someone decides to become a doctor, they undertake a grueling course of education and practice. When someone decides to be a hairdresser there are classes and certifications demanded. When you decide to become a writer, you get a lot of thinly veiled skepticism and a notebook. Dedicating yourself to making a career out of your ability to string words together can feel daunting. Writing as a hobby is easy if you’re creative. It’s just words to the page. That’s it. Writing as a career requires a lot more than good craft. Here are six things you must master if you are taking your writing from hobby to career.

1. Get Dressed

Writers like to joke that we get to do our work in our pajamas. Neither our characters nor our readers care what we look like as long as we produce the content. To some extent this is true. You can write as well in Scooby Doo lounge pants as you can in your Sunday best.

Every day, every one of us sets the stage for our sentiment, our confidence, and our success by getting dressed. When you feel great, when you feel your best, it opens up a world of possibility. Feeling confident and self-assured are important inputs into good days, successful days, and happy days. — Katrina Lake

Of course, a person like Katrina Lake would say something like that. She is the CEO of StitchFix, the clothing subscription service. It is her job to make people want to get dressed and it is in her best interest that they do. Nevertheless, she’s not wrong.

Photo unattributed from Pexels

You’ve heard the idea that you dress for the job you want. Well, if writers can write in pajamas and you want to be a writer, fuzzy pants are fair game. Except, professional writers don’t only dress in sweats and quirky tees. They are out meeting with agents and editors, going to meet and greet events, pushing their books, and making connections, all of them wearing real, out-of-the-house appropriate clothing.

This doesn’t mean you need to get out the pants suits and neckties every day. Often times I change out of PJs into clothes that look a lot like PJs. This is especially true when there are no errands on my to-do list. It matters less what you don, and more that you acknowledged the start of the day and began it with the intentional act of putting on a fresh set of clothes.

2. Pick a Time

You’ve heard it over and over again, pick a time to write and make yourself write in that time. It’s not just lip service. It is a real requirement to make writing your career.

Many writers and artists hide behind the excuse “I can only create when inspiration strikes.” Inspiration, however, is not some fickle muse, flitting about sprinkling fairy dust made of story bits and unicorn horn. Inspiration is knowing how to look at your world and craft with what is already in it.

Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don’t see any. — Orson Scott Card

I’m willing to make the bet you’ve never walked into a doctor’s office when sick only to be told the doctor is feeling uninspired and will not be treating patients. Lawyers do not skip court on days they feel their muse has abandoned them. They have jobs and they do them when it is time to work. (And sometimes, even when it is NOT time to work but they are needed.)

My time to write begins at 6:30 am. I am not a morning person by a long shot. My creative juices are most bubbly late at night. However, I have small children and they get up, insisting on food sometime around 8 in the morning. Every morning. This recovering night owl has had to adapt. I get up at 6 each morning, put on my writer clothes (see above), make coffee, and I’m at the keyboard for my writing time. I log at least an hour and a half of writerly miles each morning. The rest of my writing time is broken up between naps and playtime, meal preparation and laundry. It is there and intentional but those first precious moments of the day are critical to the rest of the day’s writing happening.

Writers wanting to take their craft from hobby to career must make a habit of writing. Same time, every day, sit down and do something about your writing. Jeff Goins has a wonderful piece that outlines one of the best suggestions I’ve seen as to how to best use that time you’ve picked. I’ll link it at the bottom of this article. The unavoidable truth is you must learn to make your time available for writing.

3. Use the Tools

I hate writing on my phone. It is inefficient, autocorrect makes editing a bigger pain than it already is, and I am far more prone to inconsistencies when working on a tiny screen. Yet, here I am, pecking this out on my mobile device. I am unable to be at my computer at this moment but this is writing time. (Dogs do not care that it is writing time when they need to pee.) So it is a necessary evil to write from my phone in this instance. I’m using a tool, a phenomenal if annoying one, to accomplish my writing today.

Photo by Fancycrave.com from Pexels

None of us are born knowing how to use blogging platforms. We learn and promptly forget the bulk of our grammar training. Luckily for us, there are endless tools at our disposal to remedy this at our disposal. Download, install, and religiously use the tools to make your job easier. Grammarly has a keyboard for mobile phones. Use it. YouTube has a host of how-to guides on any blogging platform you choose, not to mention the resources those platforms have created for their users. Even here on Medium, (a platform you need to use if you are not already), articles abound with invaluable tips, tricks, and hacks on how to make the best of site. Again, I’ll link my favorites in the reading list below.

Stop trying to reinvent the wheel and use the tools. You do not need to have perfect grammar or the prose-power of the gods to write a good piece. You need the tools that can keep your less-than-perfect tendencies in check.

4. Set Goals

“Set a goal” sounds like the advice a high school career counselor hands out like candy. It might sound hokey but it is excellent advice. Set a goal and then set another. Once you are done with those, set one more.

No one can tell you specifically what sort of goals to set. Some may work well reaching for a word count goal. Others respond well to a self-imposed deadline on the calendar. Perhaps you do well setting a timer and working until it dings. Whatever goal will hold your focus and keep you motivated is the first one to go with.

Ultimately you need more than one goal. You need a big goal — the big dreams and pot of gold goals. You also need smaller goals, tiered underneath the big guys. I create a vision board every year with my various “Big Dream” goals and supporting accomplishments I need to happen to get me there. It is a visual reminder of what I am doing and why. Some goals change and fade (that cooking blog of mine is definitely not happening). Some are increased or decreased as the reality of July hits January’s optimistic view. Ultimately they serve as a reminder when I’m feeling unfocused.

Gwenna’s actual vision board and writing space, dust included.

Maybe a vision board isn’t your thing. Maybe simply setting a daily word count goal is enough to drive you forward. Whatever it is, you need a goal, something more immediately attainable than “be the next JK Rowling.” That can be a goal, sure. Just be sure to add some step-by-step goals underneath it.

5. Get Over Your Fear of Rejection

Writing is one part creativity, one part dedication, and eight parts getting dumped on. It is easy to take those rejections personally. Writers come pre-equipped with a heavy dose of self-doubt. We are constantly questioning the worth of our work and the weight of our talent. Each time we suffer the slings and arrows of rejection it can feel like the world is confirming our own suspicions; we are not cut out to be writers.

You need to let that go. Mean comments are going to be a part of your life as a writer. They will try to cut to the bone and some of them will. Rejection letters will pile up. Perhaps the worst wound of all, your work will be utterly ignored. It may feel like all those blog posts and Medium articles are just you shouting into the void. You’re not. At least, you’re not if you keep at it. The trick to getting accepted is not to avoid the rejections. It is to lean into those rejections and glean any lessons available from them.

Hobbyist writers seek the instant gratification of having their work adored. They share it with their spouses, family, and network of built-in supporters, reveling in the compliments and appreciation. My mom has read 98% of my published body of work. She thinks I’m a great writer. And I am. But not because my mom thinks so. She is understandably biased. I am a great writer because I have a body of published work and carry an audience (albeit small here on Medium). People pay me for my unique method of pulling together thoughts and ideas on the page. People also have no qualms telling me I am most certainly not a great writer.

The trick is to absorb that, shift through for anything you can learn from the vitriol, internalize that and ignore the rest. Then, continue writing. This is my profession and rejection is an unavoidable part it. Adapt to the valid critiques, adjust to the demands of your audience, and keep writing. Submit again. Be rejected again. Rinse and repeat.

6. Remember That Some Days It Is Still a Job

When I first admitted I was a full-time, professional writer I had these foggy, glittering visions of sitting down each morning with my cup of tea and a fresh page before me. I envisioned words pouring out, directly from the fount of my artist’s soul. I knew it would be work. I knew even with my new job title, agents would not come pouring out of the woodwork begging to represent me and pitch my unfinished manuscripts to HarperCollins and Penguin. But I did have this glorified sense that now that I was doing what I love as a career, every day was going to be a good day.

Choose a job you love and you’ll never have to work a day in your life. — Unknown

Spoiler Alert: That is not true. Some days you sit down to write and nothing good comes out. You use up your writing time and have almost nothing to show for it. It feels like a grind. Some days your precious “Do what you love” career will feel like a job.

This isn’t every day for me. Luckily it isn’t even most of them. But occasionally I get up in the morning, get dressed (see above), sit down to write, and realize today is not going to be a fantastic day in the life of a writer. It won’t be one of the days included in my memoir once I achieve international fame. It’s going to be a day of prying each and every syllable out of my brain, a self-lobotomy for an ounce of content.

Those days are just as necessary as the good days when the words just won’t stop coming. Days you write when nothing wants to piece together makes you a better writer. It forces you to use those tools, coax inspiration out of nothing, and check that you are still working toward your goals.

Reading List