I had a few people wander across my timeline recently talking about “going hard at what you love for a year” and while the discourse was respectful, I was amazed at how it also left out so many factors. Moreover, there’s a whole subculture of side hustles and “if you’re doing what you love you’ll be successful” that I think is, frankly, the result of a US culture of “you can accomplish anything if you just work hard enough, and if you didn’t get it that’s your fault.”
Which means I’m going to babble about this, because I’ve gone this “go hard” route three different times, none of them went where they “should” have gone, but there is some learning to be had.
So, first time: Screenwriting. I had gotten into screenplays and film in general in college and decided I wanted to a) try writing movies and then b) seeing what I could do after I wrote them. At the time I did not have any connections, I was starting from zero.
I wrote some garbage screenplays, then a couple of good ones, then I got online and started researching small production companies that were looking to make movies. (You have to understand, in the early 2000s this was A Thing. A lot of no-name filmmakers would make a tiny film for no money, studios would be impressed, and then suddenly no-name filmmakers were getting studio gigs. At least, so the legends went. Reality was more complicated. It always is.)
Essentially, I lived two lives: Work my regular job. Home, eat, a little time with wife, then write and research selling opportunities until I couldn’t keep my eyes open. I did this for something like two years, because although I kept inching forward, I never made The Big Leap where I sold a script to Hollywood and started getting meetings and got a good agent and so on.
I did get one feature made, a couple of short films made and got a few options and yes, I did make some money but if I took out all my learning time and ONLY factored in my professional accomplishments, when I did my taxes every year my “business” lost money. And I was not pulling fancy tax footwork.
When your “hobby” becomes a job there reaches a point where the fun of it starts to leak out and it needs to stop costing you money and start making you money, and eventually I realized making less than a dollar an hour for my time when I could have been spending time with friends and family or engaging in OTHER hobbies or, you know, sleeping were better ways to spend my time.
I did take on other projects over the years but my rule was that they either had to have SOME money involved or they HAD to get made. I broke this rule a few times and got burned every time—the low-budget concept that just needed a script flamed out the minute there were words on a page because other people had “a vision” but realized the workload was insurmountable. I’m not mad about it, but I do wish I could have that time back.
I would go back to screenwriting in a heartbeat if there was money in it—even a little bit. I really did enjoy it. But screenplays that don’t become movies are, sadly, pretty useless unless . It’s better to write it as a novel, which you can always sell yourself.
Which brings me to going hard: Number 2. Amazon made it possible to sell Kindle books at basically no cost to you, as long as you were willing to put it the effort of formatting and cover design yourself. So I went hard at books for something like 18 months, writing, getting covers, formatting, marketing and also trying to break into traditional publishing. And I got almost nowhere.
My series got picked up by a small publisher for a couple of years and that was a genuine miracle, because I was unemployed during a lot of that time (part of the big economic crash) and the money the book earned through the publisher covered some bills that needed covering.
But again, at the end I was burned. Out. The money was nice, but it wasn’t replacing having a job, at all. It wasn’t even close. And I had a young child. Having two jobs—and then having to search for a job while also trying to write—just wore me down.
Do I still want to write books? Sometimes. But going back to querying, or trying to market my own stuff again? Again: It’s like having two full time jobs. And working 80 hours a week, to possibly lose money? It almost makes more sense to get a part time job and sock away $100 a week into a Roth IRA.)
(That said: I have an idea that might be good enough to sell on the title alone, which never happens to be. But piling up all those words?)
Finally, there was the time I decided to go hard and become a full-time freelance writer. There was a LOT of luck in this choice. I was unemployed (though searching for work really is a full-time job) and I had one freelance opportunity suddenly need much more writing, and a second, well-paying opportunity appear out of nowhere.
This lasted just a handful of months before it all came crashing down. My clients had budget issues and rather than, say, asking if they could cut my fees, told me they would call me when they needed me. That didn’t happen. I tried to find other clients, but nothing came of it.
And honestly, I had made major concessions to be a “full-time writer.” I wasn’t making anything close, money-wise, to what I had been making at my previous job. And I was putting in a lot more hours. And the number of times I came up with a fair price for my work, then watched it get cut in half (or sometimes way less than half) just to keep writing…
On top of that, when you’re freelancing, you’re often taking their directive and running with it. If they need a story on used cars, well, that’s what you’re writing…
And from all of this… came two big lessons.
To be clear, when going hard, I wasn’t the guy who abandoned by family and friends. I did not steal my time from their time. I stole it from my own, which mostly just made me tired all the time, since I was staying up way too late and getting up a little too early.
But the two lessons I learned were mainly about luck.
I was luckier than some. I had a few indie movies made from my scripts. Some people write for decades and never even get that.
I got to freelance write as my actual job, even it was short-lived. Very few people can say that.
And I had a bestselling Kindle novel and sold thousands of books. Again, not many people can say these things.
But each ladder of success has a gap, and getting across it, to the land where your hobby becomes your actual job for years, decades, or a lifetime? That’s just blind luck. The right project in the right hands at the right time.
And that didn’t happen.
Collectively, I spent somewhere between five and six years going full-tilt, and today… I still have a day job. Because I need money. And insurance. And assurance that I’m not going to watch my savings drain while I wait to sell something else.
On the other side of the equation: Sometimes going hard for a few years can have real benefits. The people getting a new degree, for example, or learning a new, practical skill. All the writing I did has gotten me into other, much more steady, writing opportunities.
So was it all worth it?
In my case, maybe. I basically gave myself a variety of college courses on different types of writing, and made a little money doing it. And at this point, I’ve been writing professionally for more than 20 years, and had some form of writing be the ONLY thing I’m doing for work for more than 10.
But my suspicion is that if I kept my writing to an hour or two a night I might still be writing screenplays, or novels, or articles, or something, and not have burned out. Moreover, if I had done the slow-and-steady thing, I might have accomplished at least a few of the projects I’ve started in the last 10 years instead of abandoning them because I wasn’t able to make the pages pile up as quickly as in the old days.
