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Obsession Is the Missing Ingredient in Your Writing
You learn to write quality stuff when the rent is due and you only have $87 in your checking account
One of the first lessons I learned about writing is you write quality stuff, and more of it, when the rent is due, and you only have $87 in your checking account.
When you make that fatal decision to be a writer for life, you seldom think about your ability to pay your rent, or any of your other bills, from your writing, but I had no choice but to make money writing because I refused to do anything else for a living.
Writing wasn’t a dream; writing was an obsession beginning when I was 10-years-old, and through the years the obsession has grown into a full-fledged career.
Desperation from lack of money is the surest way to seek out those paying writing jobs, and when financial times are tough, those high standards you wear to impress friends as a future best-selling novelist start to slide downward quickly.
Lack of money has given me the gift of writing obituaries on weekends for the local newspaper, creating marketing for a startup pot farm, and reviewing soft porn movies for a fledgling online magazine that lasted three months in Denver.
