I used to be very pro-freelance and anti-full-time job. We are writers, creative people, and schedules and bosses restrict us, curtail our freedom and undermine the work that we were meant to do. That is the thinking in writing circles and no doubt you’ve come across the whole “quit your job to go freelance” dream because well, isn’t that the principle the Internet was founded upon? (I’m joking, I’m joking.)
I believed it, too. Freelancing good, full-time job bad. My mind likes organized, binary sort of stuff, so that worked for me perfectly. Plus, I’ve been a freelancer since I was 21 years old and couldn’t hold down a job, and I can’t imagine life any other way.
Except, one of my closest freelancing friends left the freelance life after 8+ years to take on a full-time media job and became happier. And my cousin quit his full-time job to start working by himself and found himself isolated, uninspired, and dissatisfied with his work. What was wrong with these people? Did they not like the freedom to be their own boss, wear what they wanted, pick their projects, and have full control over their lives and schedules?
Turns out, they didn’t. My cousin got back into the workforce. It’s not the “from home” part that he had a problem with, it was the fact that he had to do everything, every little bit, by himself. My cousin is an ideas guy. He likes “building shit” as he would say. As a freelancer, a new entrepreneur, he hated that he had all these wonderful ideas but no money or resources with which to build them. So he found himself a job with a start-up that had millions in investment money and is now happily helping them spend it. His vision has a way of coming to fruition now, something that he didn’t have the means to do as a one-person operation. For him, making his vision a reality was the key thing, whether he did that from home or from an office space shared with twenty others was of no consequence to him.
My friend, a freelancer for eight years, struggled every single day for those eight years. She loved news, she loved reporting, she loved locking herself in her office and writing for eight hours a day, but she hated the pitching. She hated having to call accounts departments and asking for her money. She was really really bad at negotiating. She didn’t like looking for story ideas, either. She loathed all these parts of freelancing but they took up at least 60-70% of her time. So she took a job with a magazine, negotiated a work-from-home arrangement and now writes stories for them that are basically assigned to her. She cashes in her paycheck at the end of each month and spends six hours a day locked up in her home office doing nothing but writing. She hasn’t written a query letter in years. These days she’s looking to quit her job… to get another one. She’s happier as an employee than she ever was in her eight years as a freelancer and she’s actually getting to do the work and live the life that she thought freelancing was going to give her.
The point, of course, is that most of us pick our career goals or next steps not because we want to do those things but because we should want to do those things. Quitting your job to write a novel sounds fantastic in theory but in practice, that may be the absolute worst choice for you if you like the socializing opportunities or the health benefits that your job provides. Many of us realize soon into our freelancing careers that without a boss to keep us on task, it’s much too easy to have a few extra off-days or to lose track of goals. Some of us go the other way and become overly obsessed with our work, losing any sort of work-life balance that a regular job might have given us.
I’ve been reading far too many articles demonizing full-time jobs and “the man” lately and so I’m here to reassure you that you’re not less of a writer if you write your novel after work or submit to that essay market during your lunch hour. Far from being a failure, you’re in fact helping cement your success when you realize what your real goals are whether freelancing/writing a novel/going into copywriting/etc is indeed the right way to get there.
You’re still a real writer, but what’s better, if you know what you want and find ways to achieve it without worrying about what others think, you become a truer one as well.
What is it that you want out of your writing career? Take some time today to think about the best route you need to take in order to get it.