First and foremost, having a working spouse is a major asset.   Being a homemaker is a good second job, because most of my work is mentally easy but physically active.  Also, while not having a full-time job is a definite advantage, having a part-time job is better than having no job at all.  Quitting your job and taking three months off to write will not make you as productive as dropping from 40 hours a week to 35 hours a week will be.  Most people will not really write eight hours a day five days a week unless they are really good at self-discipline and have already gone past the one-hour-a-day and three-hours-a-day milestones.  I think it’s kind of like exercise.  When you’re just starting, once a week is fine. Three times a week may be your personal max (like me!).  Only professionals and Olympic hopefuls are really going to be able to practice eight or ten hours a day. 

If you want to quit your job to be a writer, first do two things.  Take a week-long “writing vacation” and write down how many hours you REALLY spend writing. Secondly, find out how much health insurance costs for an unemployed person.  Then look up the cost of a typical surgery.  Then realize that you’d have to sell three average sci-fi novels to pay for one caesarian or appendectomy.  Spend a little time on livejournal and see how often someone is raising money for a writer who didn’t have health insurance/car insurance or had some catastrophe happen.

Too much free time and/or lack of structure can be inhibiting, because I think “I can always do it later” and then it doesn’t get done. Or worse, I get bored/directionless and don’t want to do anything.  (I understand this well, because I have been a stay-at-home mom for most of a decade, and when the children are very small and unable to speak, it’s sometimes like being under house arrest.)  Like any habit, I have to schedule a time for it and stick to it until it becomes unthinkable not to follow the routine. Stop watching television, and that will likely free up eight hours a week.

Something that helped for me was to get a laptop without internet access (okay, it has internet access, but I don’t know how to do it.)  I’ve been writing in coffee shops, two mornings a week.  It’s good. Slower than three hours a night, but I managed to write a novel last year.  These are good and bad, these coffee mornings. Good because those two or three hours are fairly productive; I write on average 1000-2000 words each writing day.  Unlike at home, where I dick around and check Facebook compulsively, when I’m in Starbucks I feel like the clock is ticking and I usually knuckle down and write.  I’m coasting out of the post-Clarion slump though, and I feel like I want a little more than a measly five hours a week, so I started a second novel to write on my distraction machine (the desktop) in the evenings and when I have a spare moment.  I’m 18k into the desktop novel and 8k into the laptop novel, and I started the laptop novel earlier. Don’t know if that’s meaningful. 

I think it’s helpful to think of writing as a hobby instead of a career.  For most of us, that’s all it will ever be. Hobby might seem derivative, but it shouldn't be.  Most people care more about their hobbies than their "real jobs".  Just because it’s a hobby doesn’t mean you can’t excel at it or that it’s not meaningful. My boss’ hobby is archery, and she’s on the U.S. National team.  She’s one of the top twenty archers in the world.  She sometimes gets free stuff (risers and limbs and arrows and team shwag) but it doesn’t pay the bills like her day job does.  The other thing about putting it in the “hobby” category is realizing that there’s a sliding scale, from dilettante to otaku.  You can be as obsessive as you want, just do it for its own reward because you love writing and not because you want to impress chicks at parties.  (Single chicks are usually more impressed by stable employment anyway.)  

My personal belief, also, is that there’s no such thing as talent.  Talent is bullshit.  There’s “good enough” and “not good enough” and most people fall into the former category.  If you fall into the latter category, you just have to work harder (and may never get better than “pretty good”, but as a reviewer I know that mediocrity is not a barrier to publication.)  I was just reading Malcolm Gladwell’s new book about people who excel in their fields and he said that what separates the excellent from the merely competent is 10,000 hours of practice.  That’s a lot of time. Years and years and years of practice.  If you want to be really good, there is no substitute for ass-in-chair time.   

No editor knows about that work of genius on your hard drive unless you send it to them.  And even if it is a work of genius, they might reject it anyway because they’re in a relationship with another work of genius right now.  Send it out again, and again, and again or you’ll never find a home for it.  I submit again and again for the same reason I make art and give it away: Because I want to share it.  

 Except for Harper Lee, no one’s first novel is any good.  Mine wasn’t. Even the second draft wasn’t.  The 3.0 version is pretty good, but not nearly as good as the novels I wrote after that one.  (I thought my sixth novel was pretty good, but I gotta tell you, my eleventh novel rocks.) If you want to be a novelist, you need to write more than one novel.  Even people who become runaway best sellers (ahem, Stephenie Meyer and J.K. Rowling) usually don’t sell well until their third book. 

 And when things get depressing, and when I’ve gotten my hundredth rejection or whatever (though I take perverse pride in my rejection slips) there is always the work itself.  Sometimes I get down because I’ve written and rewritten and rewritten well over a million words of fiction and yet my sales still haven’t even come close to, say SFWA membership requirements.  And then I’ll start writing, and I get involved in my characters’ lives, and I want to read it out loud to my husband because I’m so excited, and I point out the trailer park where my character’s mother lives (completely confusing my mother, who thought I was talking about a real person) and I fall asleep thinking about my characters, and wake up thinking about them.  And then I remember: this is why I write.  Because it’s like reading, only better.  Because I need to create. Because I believe in these people I’ve created, in their stories, and if I love them enough that I stay up till three am because I can’t bear to stop reading, then maybe someone else out there will feel the same way.  

And if they don’t, well, this next novel is going to be fantastic.