Writing for a living is interesting. And by interesting I mean a maddening roller coaster of self doubt and overconfidence. It’s incredibly difficult to keep on task when you work for yourself, because there is no framework. You’re literally making things up for a living, including your own schedule. In an attempt to describe just how much of a struggle it is to squeeze anything meaningful out of a workday that starts when we say it does and ends the same way, I’ve identified five distinct steps that writers pass through during their hours spent tied to their computers.

Step One: Delusion

This stage is probably the most creative, as well as the most ambitious. While here, your goals for the day are lofty as fuck. You are going to write 15,000 words, outline a new novel idea, finish a short story, edit a few chapters of a first draft, and write a blog post or two. This furious planning starts around the time the alarm goes off at 4:30 or 5:00 in the morning. Your mind is a fertile treasure trove teaming with possibility that is yours for the taking if only you will get your lazy ass out of bed and get started. But, you don’t.

Step Two: Apathy

Creativity is a sword that cuts both ways, and this is the point in the day in which you use that sword to inflict the most damage to yourself, because if a way exists to derail your forward progress, you will either find or create it. Despite planting your ass in front of your computer by seven a.m., you’re unable to get to work. Well, you don’t have your coffee yet, and by the sounds of things, it’s just about finished brewing. Go get yourself a cup. While you’re out there, take a peek in the fridge. It’s too early to eat, isn’t it? Yeah, probably. You notice the time on the microwave. Oh, shit. Have you really been standing in the kitchen for nearly ten minutes? You book it back to your desk. By now, someone else is awake and messaging you. You message back. Check Twitter. Check Facebook again. It’s been quite some time since you posted to Instagram. Better get on that. Another friend messaging. And another. You haven’t even looked at the dozens of emails that have crash landed into your inbox. You start through those, looking for correspondence from clients first (I mean, you are working, supposedly), and then branching out to other messages. You fall into a rabbit hole. You resurface for more coffee. Then a snack. Bathroom break. Your dogs bark and you spend several minutes petting them. Before you know it, the afternoon is creeping closer and you’ve written fuck all. Shit. You have something to do that evening. You need to get it together. Stat. No more fucking around.

Step Three: Haggling

At this phase in the day, you’re beginning to acutely feel the passage of every solitary second. You do quick calculations in your head, comparing the time you still have left to write versus the time you’ve already wasted. Cursing yourself, you fire off a number of firm directives. 1,000 words before you can even think about taking a bathroom break, despite the fact that you’re 5 minutes away from an embarrassing accident (you are home alone, however, and your dogs don’t judge). 2,000 words before you get another snack or check social media. 8,000 words before you can leave your desk. You are painfully aware that you are to blame for this mess, but still see a way to meet a few of those lofty goals from early that morning. Definitely not all of them–that ship has long since sailed while you stood watching it instead of writing–but enough. You knuckle down in the limited hours you have left. You consider canceling whatever you have going on that evening, but it’s impossible. The only option is to complete your work. It’s fine. You can do this.

Step Four: Wretchedness

You can’t do this. No one can write 8,000 words in four hours. What were you thinking? Why didn’t you get up at 4:30 when the alarm went off? Why did you go to the kitchen ten times? Was that 20 minute long back and forth on Twitter really necessary? You are always doing this, and if you keep on the same way, you’ll never make your deadline and you won’t get paid. In case you haven’t realized, you need money to live. Thus begins your decline into the depths of despair at your own inability to muscle through your lifelong penchant for procrastination. You know how you are and you haven’t done anything to change it. Maybe you can’t. Maybe this freelancing thing just isn’t for you. But the thought of returning to a regular eight to five makes your skin crawl and your stomach drop. Still, instead of doing this, your time might be better served sprucing up your resume…

Step Five: Compliance

You are a world class procrastinator whose mind runs a hundred miles an hour. Okay. That’s nothing new. And since you know how you are, let’s just get this work done, shall we? We’ve had our pity party, and now it’s nose to the grindstone. You have bills to pay, after all. Somehow, this tough talk works. You crank up the music, you put your hands on the home row keys, and you get cooking. Before you know it, you reach the goal, and then you pass it. You don’t get close to the herculean itinerary your sleep starved brain cobbled together that morning as you lay in your bed maniacally planning a future that was never to be, but you rally and end the day somewhat successfully. You also kick off the delusion stage of the next working day a bit early, promising that tomorrow things will be even better because you won’t let yourself get off track in the first place. You will avoid this entire mess and break the five step cycle!

And, like the sucker you are, you believe it.

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I’ve been a writer since I was in middle school, and I can’t remember a time when I haven’t looked at a shelf full of books and imagined my own future novels sitting there. In between those halcyon days and now, my life unwound in ways I never imagined as a middle schooler–a child of my own, college, marriage, divorce, iterations of ‘real’ jobs that kept money rolling in but weren’t especially fulfilling. All the while, I kept writing, still dreaming of that day when I’d find my own books for sale. But it took actually getting let go from one of those ‘real’ jobs to force me into finally deciding to try my hand at writing for a living.

Once you become an adult, it’s difficult to justify spending time on something that doesn’t pay the bills, take care of your kid, or clean your house. And folks are quick to storm all over your parade when you tell them you want to pursue something artsy. Oh, you write? How nice. My 7 year old likes writing too.

But there are some people who aren’t as judgmental and awful. Upon hearing that I’m a successful freelancer, they want to know how I managed to escape the hellish trap of working in a job you dislike so you can afford a life that’s not quite going the way you planned. I became a freelancer officially after losing my job last April, but I learned the focus and discipline necessary to write all day long many years before that. And for those of you who are wishing and hoping and thinking and praying and planning and dreaming to transform your own love of writing into a job that actually pays the bills, I have some suggestions to get you started.

Treat writing like the job you want it to be

I used to write in between managing the rest of my life–raising my kiddo, doing laundry, working a job, etc., etc.. But once my kiddo was in school and I had a supportive (now ex) husband who agreed I could give this writing thing a go and see where it led me, I realized the only way I was going to be able to get any consistent work done was by actually treating writing like a job, not a hobby that I fit in if I found myself with an abundance of free time. Once I shifted the way I thought about it–even though I wasn’t yet making any money–I had instant results. Don’t ever let anyone tell you that envisioning shit doesn’t help you actualize it, because it totally does.

Plant your ass in a seat

This is critical. The best way to treat this writing thing like a job is to sit your happy ass in a chair for sprawling hours at a time and force your fingers onto the keyboard. No matter what happens, power the hell through. Doing this helped me set up my own individual groove…and the words flooded in by the thousands every day. Thanks to this process, I found that writer’s block isn’t really a thing. It’s really just a prettied up way of saying ‘plain old loss of focus’. And do you know what the cure is? Keeping that ass in that seat.

Don’t focus so much on quality of the words you write (that’s what editing’s for, silly). Focus on quantity, because without quantity, you can’t get to quality. If you have to put a knife to your throat in order to force yourself through the harder scenes, do it. Every time I do this, I’m sure what I’ve written is complete shit, but then I go back to read it and am pleasantly surprised if not outright pleased as punch. But you’ll never get there if you keep removing that ass from that seat. I’ve had days where I knocked out well over fifteen thousand words. Just don’t overthink it. Give your inner editor/critic a swift kick in the balls and keep writing so furiously, you don’t have time to contemplate the how and why. In this way, I went from writing a novel a year to writing three to five a year (and now that I freelance, I can do an 80k novel a month, no joke, and that includes editing).

Make like Virginia Woolf and get a room of your own

For years, I wrote on my living room couch, sometimes while the TV was on. It sounds incredibly stupid now, but that’s how it was. When I first started treating this writing thing seriously, I made myself go to my local library from the time it opened until I needed to pick up my daughter from school in the mid afternoon. This got me used to sitting at a desk and writing for hours at a time. I couldn’t wander to the kitchen or decide my baseboards needed a good scrubbing at the library. It also helped that I didn’t yet have a Twitter account and only had like 50 friends on Facebook. After a few months of that, I trusted myself enough to try working at home, but not on the couch this time. With the help of my (now ex) husband, I converted one of our guest bedrooms into an office. Every morning I got up at 5, went running, took my daughter to school, and then came home to write until it was time to pick her up again. Having my own space that was only for writing changed everything.

Soldier through, no matter what

I have submitted eight novels to agents and dozens of short stories to literary magazines. I’ve managed to land an agent and work with her for two years through several edits of my novel only to have her tell me that she was quitting the business ASAP, without selling my novel first (that was a blow that took some time from which to recover). I have weathered more rejection than you can imagine. It’s a bummer and I hate it, but it has never made me question my desire to write. I know I can string words together so they jump off of the page. I just need to get the right piece of work into the right person’s hands, and that hasn’t happened yet. So, no matter what, keep writing. Even if you’re working a job you hate. Even if you believe what you’re creating is total shit. I guarantee you, it isn’t. Writing is a process. The more you do it, the better you get. Stopping won’t get you where you want to be. Do. Not. Quit.

There are writers who are much more successful than I am, but there are also writers who are stuck where I used to be: dreaming about turning this burning desire into a job that pays real money. I’ve done that (this would be a marvel to the Tess of several years ago). I still have more work to do to get to the point where I’m seeing my own original work on the shelf, but I’ll take this. For now. But, believe me, the hustle never ends.

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