I realized the other day that a lot of people don’t know how I got to the point of quitting my day job and working as a writer full-time. I am sure a lot of people assume that it was a moment of being fed up with my work and ready to move on, and that I launched my writing life from that moment.
Nothing could be further from reality for me!
I began writing in earnest two and a half years before I quit my day job. I also didn’t dislike my day job; I just was amassing enough clients that I had to choose between cutting back on writing or becoming entirely too stressed. After a lot of soul searching, I chose to leave a job I liked in order to pursue the exciting possibilities implied in a career working for myself.
So how did I get started? Well, I’d written off-and-on for 10 years: small magazines in various cities, an article for my alumni magazine in college, that sort of thing. But after a friend of mine got published in a digital publication without a lot of fuss, I thought, why not me?
My first few months involved a lot of cold pitches: writing to the editor of a publication and asking if I could write an article for them. For the first time, however, I only agreed to produce the article if there was an established plan to pay me something.
I began during a break from my job (I was on a 10-month contract), but found that, in a few hours on the evenings or weekends, I could produce a couple of articles a month. So I kept doing it, and kept pitching.
That is how it all began!