Somebody posted recently in a writers group I belong to on Facebook. She wanted to know what everyone in the group did for a living, besides writing. Now, I've always known that for an author to write full-time is an incredibly rare thing, and that even some of the most famous authors in history supported themselves with full-time careers right up until they died - some of which had nothing whatsoever to do with writing.
Still, the responses to that post surprised me. We've got some pretty big names on our group, people whom I felt sure would be writing full-time by now. Alas, not even them.
I was also amazed at the sheer diversity of jobs that authors are doing. We've got software developers (like me), psychologists, farmers, watchmakers, social media managers... even a bull semen salesman!
Of course, most authors hate their day jobs and would love to write full-time one day. But there are more than a few (also like me) who actually love our day jobs. We love writing too, of course, but we couldn't really see ourselves giving our jobs up to write all day. It's very conflicting - for me, I guess my ultimate goal would be to cut the hours spent at my job by half, and spend the rest of the time writing.
Who's your favourite author, and what do (or did) they do to pay the bills?
No comments:
Post a Comment