Yes, You Can Have a Creative Career
...If you're comfortable with a certain amount of risk.
Later today, after I get my work done, I’ll be rifling in the back of my closet for my best jackets and trousers and my flashiest oxford shoes, playing dress-up until I land on the perfect outfit for next week. Because next week, I’ll be down in the States—in my home state, in fact—to teach a few master classes at the Southwest Washington Writers’ Conference. I also have the honor of being one of the featured speakers at the conference, alongside Garth Stein, author of The Art of Racing in the Rain and many other books. (I’m really looking forward to meeting Garth! He seems like a fun dude.)
For me, speaking at conferences has been one of the unexpected highlights of my writing career. As it turns out, I also really love teaching and I have a knack for it, so presenting my various workshops on craft and business strategy is also a big perk of being a full-time writer. (If you enjoy public speaking, that is! 😆 ) There’s something about helping others in a concrete, measurable way that satisfies me on a very deep level.
In fact, the happiness I get from helping other writers is why I’m writing this today rather than something else. See, I really don’t want my Substack to be about “writing advice.” My ultimate goal for this space is to build up an audience of fiction readers who are (eventually) willing to pay to gain access to exclusive fiction that I publish only on Substack, behind a paywall. This will create another revenue stream that publishers can’t touch, which in turn will help make my career more secure and will keep control over my creative output in my hands. But I’ve seen a lovely response from other writers to my previous post, and it seems that right now, folks could use some encouragement and good advice. I’m happy to provide that today rather than… whatever personal-bloggy stuff I was planning to write this morning instead.
(If you decide to follow me or subscribe to my Substack, please be aware that most of what I’ll do here is personal-bloggy stuff! This is not intended to be a Substack that only deals in career advice for writers… though I am happy to give my advice now and then, when it’s needed. And you’re always welcome to get in touch with me via Notes or elsewhere on social media with any questions you may have about navigating the crazy landscape of the publishing world. I like to help when I’m able!)
At the conference next week, I expect to field a lot of questions about HOW one makes this happen… how does one build a sustainable career as a fiction writer? I know I will field this question because I always do field it at conferences—many times, in many settings, from panel discussions to standing in line for coffee to being approached by a hesitant and sheepish conference-goer while I’m making my way from one scheduled event to the next, to washing my hands in the bathroom. HOW do I do what you’ve done, Libbie?? HOW do I make this seemingly impossible dream into a reality? (I don’t mind being asked, by the way. God knows, I am fully aware of how hard it is to find good, accurate, actionable information on this subject, and if your only chance is to ask someone immediately after they’ve peed, you might as well shoot your shot. Just please don’t ask me while I’m peeing. That would be a little weird.)
The shortest and truest answer is not “Find an agent” or “Write to market” or any of those common platitudes you might expect. The shortest and truest answer is “Mindset.” I talked about this in my keynote speech at the 2023 Historical Novel Society North America conference (and I also went into more depth in that speech about my funky, unexpected career path.)
The way you think about your career—such as it is now, and the career you want to have in the future—will determine what that career looks like. The way you talk to yourself and to other people about your career will determine the boundaries and limitations of what you can and will achieve.
A resilient career depends on building multiple income streams, not relying on a single source for support.
For a decade now, I’ve been talking to a lot of aspiring full-time novelists at a lot of conferences and I know how common it is for people to believe that they’re unlikely to ever reach this goal. Many of you, like me, dreamed of “being a writer” since childhood, but when you expressed that desire, well-meaning yet ultimately ignorant authority figures (parents, teachers, etc.) told you to “have a backup plan.” They set the expectation that it was probably never going to happen for you; that there was too much risk involved to make this goal sensible; that it was somehow dangerous to try.
As I expressed in my previous post, I’ve had very little luck in my career and have gained everything I do have by grinding work and an intensity of determination that has actively scared some people in my life. (I don’t put any stock in astrology, but for those of you who do, I’m a Taurus.) I’ve consistently been the underdog in most career scenarios.
The only real leg up I’ve had over other writers is the fact that nobody ever told me a career in the arts was “too risky” and I’d better have a backup plan. I had the good fortune to be born into a family of working artists. My dad and my grandpa were both professional painters who supported their families by making art. So when I announced at the age of eight that I was going to be a writer someday, everyone in my family said, “Good! Great! Do it!” There was never one word of discouragement or caution. It was accepted as a fact that I both could and would achieve my goal someday.
Only as an adult, when I met many other aspiring novelists and heard their stories of lifelong discouragement from friends and family, did I appreciate the privilege of growing up in a family of professional artists.
Because not only did I receive that unconditional encouragement from an early age—and thus, I never internalized the message that my dream was unlikely to come true—but I also had a front-row seat to observe the realities of managing a successful career in the arts.
From my earliest memories, I was internalizing the fact that certain skills are critical for sustaining a creative career—not just the technical skills required to create quality art (in the writing world, we call that “craft”), but a deep understanding of market dynamics, an ability to predict where the market is likely to head next, and the ability to walk the line between making the things you want to make and making the things you know you can sell for a lot of money. A variety of other business skills are also handy, such as self-discipline, self-direction, self-critique, negotiation, and a sharp eye for evaluating other people’s personalities, so you can make the alliances that will benefit you and avoid the relationships that might lead to exploitation.
Most writers are not naturally gifted with all of these traits. I know I wasn’t! But I had the advantage in my upbringing. I knew from childhood that my future as a writer wouldn’t just depend on how well I could write. In fact, I knew that my writing would be the least important factor in determining whether I achieved my goal or not. (Unfair, but true.) If I intended to make this career happen, I needed to focus on building the skills and gathering the knowledge that would get me there.
Another major benefit to my upbringing was a lifelong awareness that a career in the arts comes with a hefty dose of financial risk. Income fluctuates—sometimes dramatically—from year to year. This is not the kind of career where you can depend on earning the same amount of money with steady reliability, the way you can with a wage or a salary. I’ve had years where my income dropped by as much as $150,000 compared to the preceding year. And I’ve had years where my income increased by $200,000 compared to the preceding year.
It’s only careers in the arts that are dismissed as unrealistic. And yet, countless people do have these careers.
A career in the arts requires careful management of one’s finances—living well within your means, putting any windfalls that come your way into savings for rainy days… because the rainy days will certainly come, even after exhilarating peaks of great success. In fact, you’ll have entire rainy seasons. You’ll have The Year Without Summer, where the rain never lets up, and you have to be prepared for those times.
There is never any certainty about how much you’ll be paid for your next book. You can never predict whether your publisher will promote a book well enough that it earns out its advance and brings in royalties (though there are certain trends that hold true across the industry—the higher your advance, the more likely a publisher is to actually promote the book and make it sell.)
A resilient career depends on building multiple income streams, not relying on a single source for support. For my dad and my grandpa, professional visual artists in the late 20th century (before the internet changed how art is sold), multiple income streams meant placing their work in a wide variety of galleries; licensing their work to be sold as calendars, greeting cards, and prints; and teaching workshops to newer artists. For me, a professional writer in the 21st century, multiple income streams means working with a wide variety of traditional publishers, self-publishing, podcasting, teaching workshops and masterclasses, and—coming soon to this very platform—offering exclusive fiction behind a paywall.
Do I know how much money I’ll make in 2025? Nope. No clue. All I can do is focus hard on the quality of my work and on developing and maintaining those multiple income streams, squeezing the maximum amount of dollars from each one, and pivot my focus to whatever is working best in the moment.
These are the practical realities of managing a successful career in the arts. Not knowing how much money you’ll make from one year to the next isn’t a comfortable place for many people, and it’s not a practical or sustainable situation for many people, either, due to family commitments or other factors that must, out of necessity, take priority.
And writing (or other forms of art) isn’t really any riskier, or more difficult to break into, than most other professions. It all depends on your personal comfort level with the type of risk and commitment the career requires. For example, running one’s own business carries tremendous risk. If you open, say, a mechanic’s shop, you’ll be at the mercy of market forces on the macro and micro scales; any random shift in society (such as a viral pandemic) could put you out of business at any time. Doctors commit to nearly a decade of specialized and very expensive education, and then they have to spend a couple of years doing residencies and internships that are exhausting and incredibly demanding on their personal lives. I’ll be honest—it sounds way harder and riskier to try to become a doctor than a writer. Yet nobody ever tells an aspiring med student that they’d better have a backup plan because what if they can’t hack it and they have to drop out? What if they waste all that tuition money and all that time and they never make it all the way to their goal? Nobody ever tells an aspiring shop owner that their dream is too pie-in-the-sky to ever become reality, because small businesses go under all the time, so why even take the risk?
It’s only careers in the arts that are dismissed as unrealistic. And yet, countless people do have these careers. Most of the people I know are gainfully employed in one creative field or another—a case, no doubt, of birds of a feather flocking together. But people write full-time. I’m one of them. People paint full-time. People make music full-time. People act full-time. People make films and YouTube content and busk on the streets full-time. If we’re all doing it, then it can’t be as impossible as everyone around you keeps telling you it is!
Even if you can’t currently accept the inherent risk, that doesn’t mean a career in the arts is out of reach for good. If you have dependents you must care for, a full-time writing gig might be too risky for now… but maybe it’s a level of risk you can see yourself comfortably accepting later on, when your kids are grown up or your aging parents have passed away or your situation otherwise changes. In the meantime, you can prepare for that day by building the skills you’ll need when it comes time to make that transition. Not only the technical skills that will help you make outstanding art, but the business skills that will allow you to navigate the less-creative aspects of your future career, like effective marketing, negotiation, money management, and self-discipline.
And if you do aspire to a creative career, remember that it is mindset that will determine whether you ultimately achieve that goal or not. Tell yourself now that you can and will do it someday. Believe it. And then live in a reality where you know it’s possible, even if everyone around you thinks it’s not.