How Do I Survive as a Full-Time Writer?

From the archive. First published February 2021.

“You’re making a mistake,” the professors warned us from the podium.

The induction programme in the first week of journalism school was soaked in a sad message: that the writing profession doesn’t pay well, and neither does journalism.

The hours you work in a week and what you earn add up to a terrible deal.

You might as well work in a coffee shop.

Nobody makes a good living as a writer.

Remember Vincent van Gogh? Even he was a starving artist, struggling to make ends meet.

History books have told the stories of poor, old, complaining artists over and over. We have heard them.

The story is everywhere. But is the starving artist still real?

“No,” says Jeff Goins in his book Real Artists Don’t Starve.

Of course, he picks a big example: Michelangelo, the artist behind The Creation of Adam.

The year is 1995. A professor is about to make an unusual discovery: five-hundred-year-old bank records belonging to Michelangelo. What are the odds?

What he finds in the records is astonishing.

A few years later the professor tells Goins that the old story from history class, that Michelangelo struggled like van Gogh, is a hoax.

Michelangelo was rich, and he was a rainmaker. When the records were tallied, he came out as the richest artist of the Renaissance, with a net worth close to $47 million in today’s money.

The romanticised poverty of artists, barely getting by, persistently struggling and dying penniless before their time, was just a model we picked for the creative life.

Goins says the solution is to replace the idea of the starving artist with the thriving artist, with a new set of rules, in which you don’t die with your best work still in a drawer. Instead, you put it out and thrive.

Practise in public.

Artists tend to see art as something untouchable.

That’s what starts the idolising of art-making. As a consequence, we don’t consider our art something we can sell.

The way out of that outdated tradition is to share your work consistently. Put things out there.

If you publish one article every five months on your blog, of course you’ll struggle as a writer. You’ll never reach the key ingredient of high performance: feedback.

First, get comfortable sharing on a platform of your choice, so people can find out about you. Then put the rest of your time into doing your thing.

Don’t work for free.

Most artists don’t mind taking freelance work on the side. That’s where Goins says they make one of the most common mistakes: working for free.

Unless the opportunity is extremely good, Goins says, never work for free.

This is a new Renaissance.

This is a great time to be an artist.

There are endless opportunities to make a living from your talents.

Find a way to do that. If you’re a writer, don’t measure success by how many books you sell. Instead, acknowledge the power of the internet. Use real-time data to find out what you need to do next to succeed as a writer.

It’s no surprise that there are millions of artists funded by patrons in this world, who keep doing what they want to do in life, which is making art, while people sponsor them.

They are ordinary people, just like us.

Recap

• The starving artist story is a hoax. The solution is to practise in public and put out work consistently.

• Never work for free unless the opportunity is extremely beneficial.

• Find a way to monetize your art.

After my graduation in 2016, I entered the real world thinking I would need to live a life of a starving artist to be able to do what I love.

I’ve since discovered that it has never been easier to make a living as an artist, the complete opposite of what my journalism school’s induction suggested.

It still has its thin months. In February 2024 I ended up in a small hill-town cafe, serving coffee and tea to tourists in exchange for a bed and food, because I wanted a few weeks of cover before I went completely broke. I owed money to several people, and one client paid me a small monthly amount, not enough for three full meals and the friends who travelled fast. I sat in the room and wrote a plan: find a couple of stable clients, make the first repayment, work out the coming months. The evening walk to the forest reserve fell through, like most things that week. Still, I wrote a short list of gratitude: friends who covered a hotel, a family that texted to check I was alive, a skill set that kept receiving job invitations. I read it back the next morning. It was a decent list for a man who was broke.

Making a living as a writer is easier than my professors said, and it still means counting what works while you build the plan.

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