I have a question: how do I pursue my passion?
Another way of looking at this might be to ask: what’s the point at which we commit to something wholeheartedly?
A few years ago, I thought I was doing exactly this. I was accepted onto a creative writing MA course. I borrowed a lot of money to pay the fees, but I didn’t mind, because I thought: this is it. This is me becoming a writer. On the other side of a one intensive year, I’ll have it all figured out.
So I lived the life of a starving artist, working part-time while I wrote my dissertation, imagining how my life would be different on the magic day I handed it in. I received an MA with distinction. I had half the draft of a book finished. And I had no direction whatsoever.
I continued working the same part-time admin job I’d had since I first graduated from college. It had been demeaning enough to make peanuts doing something mind-blowingly dull after my first degree, but then I had promised myself it was only temporary; now I was starting to feel that I’d fallen down a pit and I couldn’t climb out. I began to identify myself by my job, rather than my ambitions: I’m just an admin assistant, I’d say. I make photocopies, mostly. I abandoned the book.
I was only working 20 hours a week, but I would come home in the early afternoons feeling completely drained. I would curl up on the sofa and doze until dinnertime. With every spare moment not spent sleeping, working, or moping, I worried about how I was going to pay for things. I kept maxing out my credit card and I couldn’t get an overdraft and my partner, in the early stages of launching his own freelance career, didn’t have enough money to support me.
I didn’t write very much, either.
On the other hand, doing what I’m doing now – a full-time, intellectually engaging office job – isn’t really the answer, either. I may have more energy, more enthusiasm. I may be writing a lot more than I did when I worked part time, but there is only so much time that you can give. And when I’m not writing or traveling, which is, let’s face it, most of the time, I resent the fact that I’m not writing or traveling. In the same way that anxiety is not conducive to creativity (for me), neither is anger and resentment.
So what is the answer?
This is all a bit like embarking on a quest. I know what the goal is, but I don’t know the best path to it.
Here’s the life I live now:
I’m a writer by night. During the day I earn enough money to support myself; I have very little debt, except to my very understanding family. I have some flexibility in my job – the ability to work partly from home, to take time off to visit my parents in California over Christmas – but I am also married to it; I have a contract, a salary, and a responsibility to an organisation and a goal which is not mine. I daydream incessantly. I don’t spend as much time or energy as I’d like on the things that are actually important to me.
Here’s the life I want to live:
I’m a writer. During the day I earn enough money to support myself by doing things I’m passionate about. This isn’t always writing or blogging – sometimes I’ll be working on other projects, I’ll be teaching, or editing, or researching. But I don’t have a “proper job” and I always feel that I have control over what I do. I have the flexibility to travel, to work from abroad, to keep funny hours sometimes.
What I don’t yet know is how to get from here to there.
To try to figure it out, I broke down my expenses. Which is not, incidentally, something I’d recommend doing without a large glass of gin at your elbow to act as an anaesthetic. Since I got my full-time job (at the start of the summer), I’ve started spending a pretty shocking amount of money.
My conclusions are as follows:
My rent is relatively low for where I live, and I don’t have a car or any major monthly travel expenses like a bus or subway pass, as I mostly use my bicycle to get around. I don’t pay for a gym membership and my partner and I share the burden of utility bills.
On the other hand, the UK is an expensive place to live, and I have a frivolous streak – I love eBay, new books, and the pub a little too well. Travel from here can be affordable (budget airlines, the Eurostar), but going home to California will set me back about £500 every time, no matter what. And I appear to be constantly paying for little necessary things – like re-soleing old boots – that really add up.
I do know how to live on very little money – I’ve done it before – and I can see some things I could easily cut back on (mostly in the food/drink department). But I don’t necessarily want to go back to that life, because I know that as soon as I start making decisions like: no, I can’t afford to buy an avocado this week, as soon as I start relying on credit cards again, I lose the confidence and the energy to create.
Going freelance is part of the answer, not the whole answer.
To date, I’ve never received more than $150 for any one piece of writing. Mostly I’ve received about $25 per piece – from Matador, and recently from an expat site that I contributed to. As supplementary income, this is fine, but to fully support myself on $25 an article, I would need to produce a ridiculous amount of quality writing per month. And the great truth of freelance writing is, of course, that there’s never any guarantee you’ll even always have work. It would be unrealistic to suppose I could produce enough $25 articles to support myself, but even more unrealistic to suppose that anybody would want that many pieces from me.
I could raise the stakes, hope that higher-paying markets might buy my pieces. And of course I will do this, and I do hope they’ll want me, but I don’t feel that I can build a life around this hope, not yet. In order to sustain myself both financially and emotionally, freelance writing needs to be part of what I do, not all of what I do.
As for the rest of it – I guess I’ll just keeping slogging. I still can’t see the whole path, but I can see where it starts. So I’ll start there.
Assignment 7: Expenses, Income, and the Logistics of Following a Dream
I have a question: how do I pursue my passion?
Another way of looking at this might be to ask: what’s the point at which we commit to something wholeheartedly?
A few years ago, I thought I was doing exactly this. I was accepted onto a creative writing MA course. I borrowed a lot of money to pay the fees, but I didn’t mind, because I thought: this is it. This is me becoming a writer. On the other side of a one intensive year, I’ll have it all figured out.
So I lived the life of a starving artist, working part-time while I wrote my dissertation, imagining how my life would be different on the magic day I handed it in. I received an MA with distinction. I had half the draft of a book finished. And I had no direction whatsoever.
I continued working the same part-time admin job I’d had since I first graduated from college. It had been demeaning enough to make peanuts doing something mind-blowingly dull after my first degree, but then I had promised myself it was only temporary; now I was starting to feel that I’d fallen down a pit and I couldn’t climb out. I began to identify myself by my job, rather than my ambitions: I’m just an admin assistant, I’d say. I make photocopies, mostly. I abandoned the book.
I was only working 20 hours a week, but I would come home in the early afternoons feeling completely drained. I would curl up on the sofa and doze until dinnertime. With every spare moment not spent sleeping, working, or moping, I worried about how I was going to pay for things. I kept maxing out my credit card and I couldn’t get an overdraft and my partner, in the early stages of launching his own freelance career, didn’t have enough money to support me.
I didn’t write very much, either.
On the other hand, doing what I’m doing now – a full-time, intellectually engaging office job – isn’t really the answer, either. I may have more energy, more enthusiasm. I may be writing a lot more than I did when I worked part time, but there is only so much time that you can give. And when I’m not writing or traveling, which is, let’s face it, most of the time, I resent the fact that I’m not writing or traveling. In the same way that anxiety is not conducive to creativity (for me), neither is anger and resentment.
So what is the answer?
This is all a bit like embarking on a quest. I know what the goal is, but I don’t know the best path to it.
Here’s the life I live now:
I’m a writer by night. During the day I earn enough money to support myself; I have very little debt, except to my very understanding family. I have some flexibility in my job – the ability to work partly from home, to take time off to visit my parents in California over Christmas – but I am also married to it; I have a contract, a salary, and a responsibility to an organisation and a goal which is not mine. I daydream incessantly. I don’t spend as much time or energy as I’d like on the things that are actually important to me.
Here’s the life I want to live:
I’m a writer. During the day I earn enough money to support myself by doing things I’m passionate about. This isn’t always writing or blogging – sometimes I’ll be working on other projects, I’ll be teaching, or editing, or researching. But I don’t have a “proper job” and I always feel that I have control over what I do. I have the flexibility to travel, to work from abroad, to keep funny hours sometimes.
What I don’t yet know is how to get from here to there.
To try to figure it out, I broke down my expenses. Which is not, incidentally, something I’d recommend doing without a large glass of gin at your elbow to act as an anaesthetic. Since I got my full-time job (at the start of the summer), I’ve started spending a pretty shocking amount of money.
My conclusions are as follows:
My rent is relatively low for where I live, and I don’t have a car or any major monthly travel expenses like a bus or subway pass, as I mostly use my bicycle to get around. I don’t pay for a gym membership and my partner and I share the burden of utility bills.
On the other hand, the UK is an expensive place to live, and I have a frivolous streak – I love eBay, new books, and the pub a little too well. Travel from here can be affordable (budget airlines, the Eurostar), but going home to California will set me back about £500 every time, no matter what. And I appear to be constantly paying for little necessary things – like re-soleing old boots – that really add up.
I do know how to live on very little money – I’ve done it before – and I can see some things I could easily cut back on (mostly in the food/drink department). But I don’t necessarily want to go back to that life, because I know that as soon as I start making decisions like: no, I can’t afford to buy an avocado this week, as soon as I start relying on credit cards again, I lose the confidence and the energy to create.
Going freelance is part of the answer, not the whole answer.
To date, I’ve never received more than $150 for any one piece of writing. Mostly I’ve received about $25 per piece – from Matador, and recently from an expat site that I contributed to. As supplementary income, this is fine, but to fully support myself on $25 an article, I would need to produce a ridiculous amount of quality writing per month. And the great truth of freelance writing is, of course, that there’s never any guarantee you’ll even always have work. It would be unrealistic to suppose I could produce enough $25 articles to support myself, but even more unrealistic to suppose that anybody would want that many pieces from me.
I could raise the stakes, hope that higher-paying markets might buy my pieces. And of course I will do this, and I do hope they’ll want me, but I don’t feel that I can build a life around this hope, not yet. In order to sustain myself both financially and emotionally, freelance writing needs to be part of what I do, not all of what I do.
As for the rest of it – I guess I’ll just keeping slogging. I still can’t see the whole path, but I can see where it starts. So I’ll start there.