The Wife is taking paralegal classes. I approve and support her desire to move on to a better job — she’s working at a call center for a major appliance manufacturer that rhymes with “Girl School.” She’s way smarter than you need to be to answer phones and is dramatically overqualified for this job. Some of her lazier, unmotivated, and let’s face it, unintelligent co-workers drive her absolutely nuts, and I want to see her be happier when she comes home from work. One thing she loves doing is organizing things, and that’s a big part of what being a paralegal is all about. So it seems like it would be a good fit for her.
That keeps me downtown tonight — I’m just waiting for her class to end so I can go pick her up after school. My past experiences with running home, changing, feeding the dogs, and then getting yet another call from her advising that class got out early so could I come pick her up has been very frustrating, time-consuming, and a lot of wear and tear on the car. So tonight I’m just waiting downtown for the call. I’m quite hungry, actually, and will go get some food when I’m done blogging.
Now, seeing The Wife make career moves has raised an issue for me, which is whether I too should try to switch careers. I’ve been unhappy here at the Great Man Law Firm for some time. I was unhappy at my old firm in California for some time, too, before I left it. The reasons for both kinds of unhappiness are complex, radically different from one another, and who knows if they either can be or would have been mitigated by any additional efforts on my part to remedy them. And it’s also true that I enjoy some things about practicing law, very much, and I don’t know if I would want to give up the good along with the bad altogether, as opposed to trying to find a new legal job that had more of the good and less of the bad.
So both The Wife and my mother have suggested to me in recent weeks that they think I would be happier being more or less a full-time writer as opposed to being a full-time lawyer.
I believe there is something to that thought. The things I like best about law generally involve research, writing, fashioning and making arguments, and being in front of people when I have to be “on” in an advocacy capacity. The things I like least are the minutiae of calendar management, dreary and repetitive discovery, and working through a lot of pointless shouting and emotion in an effort to solve problems. Writing, teaching, or some combination of both would seem to involve more of the things I like and less of the things I don’t. There are two problems with this plan.
First of all, writing professionally is hard, risky work; I have no illusions about that. Now hard work does not scare me, and neither does a certain level of risk, but the thing that does bother me is the way to mitigate both the difficulty and the risk — which is to self-motivate to do it, every day, for eight hours a day, like a regular job. I can self-motivate, but my experience has proven that I do not self-motivate as well as I would like to, particularly if I want to be a full-time writer. I think I need to be honest with myself that I am too easily distracted in front of a computer screen to focus on writing all the time unless there is either a deadline or at least a calendar that has some external consequences for me if I fail to live up to the schedule. Setting my own schedule just isn’t good enough — I need to have something outside myself to kick my ass enough to get me to finish things on time.
Secondly, I’ve grown used to having the money and security of a lawyer’s income. Maybe I could make more than I’m making now if I got a regular writing gig, like for a newspaper or a magazine. But those kinds of gigs are hard to get and that’s where a lot of the real work for writing has to be done. A very good friend of mine back in Los Angeles is a writer (and a part-time teacher in recent years) and he has to constantly hustle for more work. It was difficult to arrange social activities with him back in L.A. because he was constantly on the make. I don’t’ begrudge him having a demanding schedule and I’m very happy for him that he’s made the writer’s life work for him. The writing itself is not nearly as difficult as getting hired to do the writing in the first place.
I could keep my part-time teaching gig to mitigate things somewhat, but the money sucks. I make about ten grand a year teaching online undergraduate or certification-level law classes. I would need to do a lot more teaching than I do to pull up the inevitable valleys in the up-and-down income of a professional writer — or continue practicing law at least part-time, which sort of defeats the purpose of giving up the law practice in exchange for a writing career.
Then there’s the question of what I would write. This is not a problem that deters me from pursuing the goal of being a full-time professional writer, but it is a challenging issue that I would need to resolve. My friend who does this got started doing a lot of political writing; speeches for politicians or ghostwriting op-eds for various public figures. From there, he’s branched out into corporate speechwriting and now is doing more corporate that political work.
That probably wouldn’t be the road I went down if I did explore it further. I don’t think I have a good feel for speeches and the sorts of rhetorical flourishes that make a good speech. As you Loyal Readers know, I write long sentences, and put those long sentences into long paragraphs. Good speeches have short sentences. Good speeches have a lot of repetition — and the very well-written speech has made the repetition subtle enough that the listener thinks the speaker is going over new ground when he really isn’t. Maybe I could achieve that with practice. But it isn’t my style.
So that makes me consider whether I want to try my hand at fiction. I’ve tried it before and wow, is it tough. I don’t have a very good feel for dialogue. I have a worse feel for plot. I’ve tried setting out a plot arc for my story to follow and found that my characters just didn’t want to follow the plot arc, and either hit a wall where nothing felt natural or real anymore, or if I allowed the characters to act and develop in a way that did, the story quickly veered off the plot arc and became a meandering, pointless miasma.
Before that happens to this post, I’ll conclude that this leaves me with only one area to go — non-fiction. That involves a lot of research and knowledge when done well; no one wants to buy a non-fiction book written by someone who is just talking out of his ass. I have an interest in history, particularly classical history, but no academic background in it and little ability to read and understand historical source materials of the classical era. I can write about law, to be sure, and there is an audience for that, but if I’m going to give up practicing law, I think I should at least explore other areas of intellectual inquiry other than law. Maybe I’d be good at writing, say, a monthly column about law for a popular audience. But where would I get that sort of thing published — and get paid for it? That’s the biggest question of all, and the country is full of writers who haven’t figured out how to answer it yet.
There’s certainly no harm in browsing your options. You should at least pick up a copy of “Writer’s Market,” for information about agents, publishers, and the available markets for your writing. For instance, if you made that credenza-and-utensil rant maybe 25 percent less gay, “Out” magazine might be interested.There are a zillion ripoffs out there directed at people who want to be published writers (or pretend they are), particularly in the forms of classes and books that purport to teach one how to write and publish. That doesn’t change the fact that many aspects of writing can indeed be taught — and, usually, must — especially as regards technical matters such as plot structure. Be advised that, probably due to the lack of any barrier to entry, there are a lot of losers, delusionals, nitwits and creepies who style themselves “writers.” In my estimation, the percentage is much higher than lawyers — maybe 99 percent. However, that leaves a really great 1 percent.
Well, thanks for the tips –watch out for creeps, read “Writer’s Market,” take plotwriting class, and be less gay.Three of those sound easy to do.
As a magazine editor, I deal with the desperation of freelance writers all day long. No, really. It’s not pretty. But, there are a lot of opportunities out there in niche markets: trade associations that publish magazines; research institutes; corporate communications; local-interest magazines. The pay isn’t great — if you’re lucky you can get $1 a word — but the more you have published, the easier it is to break into new markets.As for fiction writing — it needs to be a true calling. My father, who has been writing fiction for almost 20 years, still has not been able to make a living doing it.My advice is to network, network, network; to check out the offerings at MediaBistro.com (especially their Freelance Marketplace, and their “How to Pitch” articles — definitely worth the $49 AvantGuild membership); and to keep a day job until you find a couple of clients that are willing to give you multiple assignments.Have you ever considered writing about real estate? You know where to find me.
I think that you would be a fabulous writer. In fact, you already are. If it’s something that you think you’d enjoy why not try it? You can always change your mind. You have a lot of wisdom that other people are sure to benefit from!