It might require a little bit of creative thinking to figure out how best to do that for your art and your message, but it is possible. Anyone can build a profitable side-hustle, or even full-time income, with their art. Technology grants us the power to create our own audiences, and with this power, it’s no longer necessary to wait for lightning to strike. Like never before, each individual has the power within their own hands to make their dreams a reality. Where the idea of making a living as a writer may have been a pipe-dream in the 1980s and 90s, technology has revolutionized the industry. It is definitely a different world these kids are inheriting. “Don’t ever let anyone tell you, you can’t do it,” I told them. So, as I looked out at that sea of faces, all my students looking back at me, waiting for my next words, I just couldn’t seem to help myself. You can only bury it for a while, while it keeps haunting you below the surface, creating a kind of low-grade depression born of ignoring the thing you were meant to be doing, the person you were meant to be being. I can only speak from my experience as a writer, but I imagine it’s true of all artists. That’s the crux of the whole problem, though. It wasn’t a faucet that ever stopped dripping. My mind never stopped dreaming up characters and placing them in precarious situations. After all, writing was never a job, remember? It’s who I am, and I could never turn it off completely. But, even though I set the dream aside for a while, I never gave up being a writer. So, filled to the brim with a whole bunch of discouragement and a lack of grit built on a solid foundation of social anxiety, I didn’t. It was the reason so many adults looked on me with pity and routinely dismissed my aspirations with a simple, “Don’t waste your time, kid.” You had to be that flash-in-the-pan that was the special result of good timing, good connections, and good luck. (It means less today.) And to “make it” in the industry, you essentially had to get struck by lightning. Back then, to be a bestseller meant something. The 1980s were the heyday of the traditional publishing industry, producing such giants as Stephen King and Michael Crichton. Faced with an economy where the gap between the rich and the poor is quite simply – ridiculous, where being middle class doesn’t mean much any more about one’s ability to get by, these kids already have it hard.Įven more, the publishing world in 2018 looks nothing like it did way back in my day. I didn’t want to be another voice in their lives that told them what they couldn’t do. And suddenly I could’ve cared less about teaching paragraphs. And I, sure as heck, was too busy with my day job to worry about how anyone made a living as a writer.īut then I found myself one afternoon, standing in front of a class of students, lecturing about good paragraph structure while staring out at a sea of faces, some of whom harbored writing dreams just as I had so many years ago. And too many well-meaning adults warned me, “You can’t make a living as a writer.” Skip ahead a few decades, and in the quest for a “day job,” I somehow lost touch with the part of me that used to write about magical creatures in distant galaxies for the sheer fun of it. I began to associate writing, not with making art, but with making a living. ![]() The moment I learned how to put pen to paper, I was scribbling short stories about anthropomorphic fruit that also happened to be superheroes, and I wrote my first novel in the first grade – a dystopian fantasy about alien unicorns who arrived on earth via meteor to save the world.īut something changed during my teen years. I’ve devoured books for as long as I can remember, and some of my favorite childhood memories are of trips to the library with my mom, searching the stacks for books about unicorns. Writing, for me, wasn’t a job it was who I am. It wasn’t even a question of, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I was a writer. When I was a little girl, growing up in the 1980s, I just knew I was a writer.
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