If you enjoyed the Writing for the Long Haul series, head over and check out Cynthia Leitich Smith’s new Survivors series, where well-established writers talk about career endurance as a writer for children and young adults.
When I started out, publishers seemed reluctant to take chances on new voices. And in the pre-Potter industry, there wasn’t the widespread idea that writing for young readers was a viable and attainable career path (or at least one with the potential to generate a livable income).
Consequently, fewer younger people were pursuing it.
As a GenXer, I also entered the field as a shockingly young writer by the standards of the day.
I knew only a couple of published authors (and only online) who were around my age. The overwhelming majority were at least fifteen years older.
Most were a full generation older.
Now, the pendulum has swung hard the other way.
Do you want to be a writer for the long haul? I think the key is tenacity. Tenacity is at least as important as talent. 
Circles of Confusion got nominated for several awards and got good reviews. I wrote a second in the series and then a third. I was on a publisher-paid tour for the third book when I learned they were dropping me because the sales of my second book hadn’t been double that of my first (an idea they hadn’t shared with me, although I’m not sure what I could have done about it if I had known). Would I ever be published again?
I finished writing a YA book I really liked, about a blind girl who is accidentally kidnapped when someone steals her step-mom’s car—with her in it. My editor didn’t like it, saying that books about kidnapping were overdone.
My husband, Jack, was taking a vacation from tedious, annoying work as a high level programming consultant and writing a book about the early days of computers. I was sort of supporting the family as a legal secretary. This was a specialty I had acquired during a previous hiatus in the family fortunes—the time when I finally decided I would have to do something to make money. I was a terrific typist who could spell and construct a grammatical sentence, so temp work led to law offices and more substantial jobs. Thus at 52 I stood on the threshold of an actual career. There was still a lot of drudgery and much to learn, but I found the law interesting, and my final group of lawyers loved me.
Did I ever regret this decision? Not for a minute that I can recall. Jack and I continued our chicken-feathers existence (chicken one day, feathers the next), and I began a novel that I intended to publish. I wrote, pretty much through thick and thin, using temp jobs to stuff in the cracks.
I learned a lot from Matilda Welter, not only a lot of clever ways to cut so a manuscript would appear shorter than it really was, but many ways to get rid of stuff that even I, after the initial pain, would never miss. We waged small wars, most of which I won, over what she sometimes felt was my too literate English, and we had increasingly luxurious lunches together as management came to admire my writing and Matilda published three more of my books.
Then, after the admittedly splendid Enter Three Witches was written and published, came Jason and the Bard, drawn on my summers with Shakespeare Under the Stars and, like the Iran book, researched only in my head. This one was fun for me but not popular, having been judged “elitist” because the young actors and stage techs spouted Shakespeare (as I happened to know they would).
Then came the recession and a wretchedly new Houghton Mifflin where the idea of two sequels to The Exchange Student was entertained and then dropped. In this climate it was folly to even contemplate writing two unwanted books, but once I had the idea I plunged like a retriever into a duck pond and wrote steadily for another five years.
Kate Gilmore lost her heart to the theatre as a student at Antioch in the 1950s, where she participated in at least 80 theatre productions and took on nearly every theatrical task, from writing to directing to prompting. Along the way her verse play, Dark Wind Light Wind, was performed as the senior project of her friend Niela Miller. After college she went on to write more plays until meeting her husband, mathematician and computer game designer John Gilmore. She spent the years that followed living in New York, Italy, London, Iran, and rural New Hampshire while raising their two children.
ReTIRED and Better for It!
By writing team, I mean Ronnie and I sat side-by-side every school day for as many hours as our schedules allowed, with Ronnie at the computer keyboard (one of the earliest home systems) and me scribbling on a legal pad, bouncing ideas, plotting, creating, and finishing each other’s sentences . . . As a team we set goals—primarily to publish—and set our course of action. What we wrote—poems, puzzles, How-To, Travel, parenting magazine and newspaper articles, memoir, True Confessions, fiction, non-fiction—didn’t matter. The fun was writing and publishing, and being paid (no matter how small the check; every dollar was one less I had to make waitressing.)
Odd as it sounds, publishing can wreak havoc on our writing lives. It did mine. Having a “career” requires us to split ourselves in two: part creative writer, part business-minded author. Whether it’s true, or it’s just my excuse, the last few years I’ve been so busy moving, marrying off children, caring for aging parents, traveling, etc. etc., I haven’t had much time for anything else. Of necessity, what time I did have went to “must dos” and “should dos”—promotions &; marketing, presentations, social media—author stuff. As a result, the “want tos”—everything I enjoyed about writing, including writing and fellowship—went by the wayside. I came to one day and realized my writing life was no longer a joy. It was a job. And, judging by my actions—splitting with my agent, neglecting revisions, not sitting my butt in the chair—a job I might not want.
New tires! We all enjoyed his naiveté, and some among us filled him in on the “real” meaning of retirement. (Although I’m not sure we should have.) In a Chauncy Gardnerish way, he was correct. In retiring, Michael was replacing a worn set of work tires with a comfy new set for rolling into the sunset. Yes, retirement is an end. But it’s also an opportunity for new beginnings.
Writing for the long haul is no different than other professions, harder perhaps considering the paychecks may not be as plump or regular. It’s easy to stay busy attending to the “must dos” and the “should dos” while ignoring the “want tos.” But, attending to those “want tos” is what brings us joy. And while I don’t recommend doing anything as dramatic as calling it quits, I do suggest doing what I should have: in the same way you take your car in for servicing, schedule regular career check-ups. Ask and answer those defining questions:
My bona fides: I’ve been a full-time professional novelist for twenty years. I’ve published twenty-eight books in various genres with four different publishers. Some of my novels have won prestigious national awards, while others have tanked so badly that my royalty statements show negative sales. I had a couple of years where I made more money than I could spend, and far too many years with an income that would have qualified me for food stamps. My books have been both praised and condemned by great intellects, and given a similar treatment by great fools.
What keeps me going? Why write when there are so many other things I could be doing with my one and only life? Why not become a savior, a saint, a martyr? Why not make a ton of money and surround myself with luxury? Why not raise a litter of children and disseminate my DNA far and wide? Why not watch TV and drink beer all day? Why not stop breathing and maybe find out that I’m wrong about what happens next?
There is this writer thing that writers don’t often talk about, not even to each other in the dead of night. You see, we are all drowning, and that is the reason we keep writing, because every new book is the book that will float us above and away from (choose three) irrelevance, poverty, mediocrity, madness, obscurity, obloquy, ourselves.
When I tell people I’m a writer, often their first impression is that I author books. I don’t.
Once I got into the newsroom, however, I discovered that I didn’t have the stamina to stick with long-form investigative journalism. Instead, I was drawn to the breaking story—controversial city council meetings, campaign speeches, jury decisions—and features that focus on trends.
Based on comments I’ve heard, I know that my work has saved a household money on its phone bill, convinced a Chicagoan to ditch the Illinois winter for a warm Arizona vacation and assured an employee that a company expansion wouldn’t affect his job.
I’ve always intended to be a professional writer, that is, once I got over my childhood ambition to make a living as a chauffeur polishing and driving fancy Cadillacs. In high school I bought writing magazines and my grandmother sent me books on writing – including a fateful Writer’s Market, full of dozens, nay, hundreds, nay, thousands of places willing to pay me to write, if only I wrote what they wanted.
There’s something else: in high school I helped with the literary magazine, and in my senior year, I was Editor. I learned a lot, including how to make chapbooks.
Then, Del Rey’s sudden new editor was a disaster for us, halting the Liaden series in its tracks, and we got by for awhile as writing instructors. I taught a local adult ed class and we both taught correspondence students for the British American School of Writing. We got a well-paying gig writing a novella for a game company (a project which was never published, though) and Sharon got a job editing night-side news for the local daily paper while I did columns and computer articles for the same paper. I also was picking up part-time hours as children’s librarian for a nearby library, and when that proved a dead-end I moved to managing a computer store — where I ran the newsletter, wrote the TV ads.
A publisher came to us for ebooks, and then for all our books; Sharon stayed at the college for awhile, where she single-handedly out-published the English department for several years.
Ebook pioneer 
I’ve wanted to be a writer — specifically, a fiction writer — for as long as I can remember. I don’t know why. Possibly because stories gave me such very great pleasure as a small child. Also, I noticed that my mother was never angry when she was reading me a story; so I might have thought there was some magic involved.
Now, it would have been bad enough, to only have been cut loose from our publisher for “bad numbers.” But this “no career” business — that really twisted the tail of a discouraging situation.
Then I wrote a mystery novel, and, well . . . I began, quietly, to submit. Little things, you know; small stories that nobody would notice.
And they wanted to know when the next book was coming out.
We didn’t feel like imposters anymore; and we worked with that publisher for eight years — eleven novels and an anthology — until events overtook them and they crashed, messily, leaving us once again teetering on the edge of Publishing Death.
Not too long after we began the Fledgling project, our agent sold two books that had been circulating, in proposal, to Baen.
When I was seven, I loved books so much, I knew I wanted to be a writer and decided to give it a try. I wrote Teddy Bear in the Woods, illustrated it, stapled it together, gave it to my parents and announced, “I’m going to be a writer.” I never changed my mind.
I switched careers and for over 20 years, I wrote hundreds of live-action and animated children’s television shows. It was often a struggle to please the networks and producers and please myself as well. I was rewarded with numerous awards, including an Emmy and a Writer’s Guild award.
Humphrey turned into a successful series. Book 10, Secrets According to Humphrey, comes out soon and there will be more. I’ve finally got it made–right?