Hi All,
I have a great passion for writing. I wanna be a writer in my life. I have written couple of Articles and published a short story collection named 'Bunch of Roses' online. Now i'm writing a Novel. My big problem here is, i'm an employee in an MNC and i need to give some financial aid to family. I'm really finding it really difficult to cope with the day job and my dream in hands. I can go for a job, but the job i work should be a writing job so that at least i'm able to help my family out and i can also write. Friends... Kindly give some ideas/suggestions or is there any way that i could cross this hard ship to become a writer. Many thanks in Advance.
I agree with Alex, like many professions, if you really want to do it you will need to sacrifice, in most cases people cannot afford to sacrifice work and money and so therefore time is the easiest and most cost effective sacrifice, instead of watching TV or putting everything and everybody else before your dream, you need to ask yourself 'do I really want this?' if so what are you prepared to do about it, if it means sitting in a quiet area from 9 til midnight every night then so be it, as time goes on it becomes part of your normal working day, if and when you start to make some money at it then perhaps you can look at your day job and see how that can be shortened so that you can spend even more time on your passion, like with everything we all want badly in life, nothing comes without sacrifice.
I think you just have to get used to late nights, lost weekends and using what time you have as best you can.
I do find that time spent thinking about your story, characters, plot lines, narratives, etc. can pay dividends when you come to write as everything become so natural to you.
I have internal conversations with my characters, spend a great deal of time observing people and the movement of things and try to place my characters in all kinds of different places. Use your working time to study how people talk and engage with one another, their mannerisms, ticks and habits.
Putting pen to paper is the last part of a process whereby we describe a world; real or imagined. The more time you can spend studying that world and thinking about how best to describe it, the more you will develop as writer.
You might also try writing verse or very short stories or descriptive pieces (Kafka and many other authors have done this) - one or two paras long. These can be done very quickly (5 or 10 minutes) and then disposed of. You will find they sharpen your use of language and improve your writing.
Other than that it's just plodding away while the day job pays the bills.
A
Hi Sudarsan,
I think you've found the holy grail of questions. If I had the answer to that I would happily share it, but from a position where writing was also my living.
Much depends on your circumstances. If not for financial responsibilities I would tell my current employer that their money was no longer needed and start out again at the bottom of the ladder, running or subbing for a paper or writing endless articles, stories and whatever else fell out of my fingers, trying to tailor them to publications and building a name either as a good writer, or at least a very eager and persistent one.
If not for a dedication to my family and a beautiful little girl who I can't help but give as much time to as possible, I would use my non-working time (other than that inevitably wasted procrastinating, as I think all writers are prone to) writing and editing and plotting and whatever else I needed to do.
As it is, I can't tell my employer to stick it, and I can't help but give as much as I can to my family, so I have to accept that any profession in writing will have to come as a result of whatever hard work and good fortune this hobby of mine can bring.
If you do find the answer, please be kind enough to share!
Thanks,
Mark.