I woke up this morning feeling great. A week ago, I decided to self-quarantine out of an abundance of caution, and pretty much everyone else is doing it, too.
But I got thinking last night of how resilient people are. Part of me would like to say that it is an American thing, but I’ve got friends in China, Australia, Europe, and Latin America—and they’re all resilient, too. Let’s call it a human thing. We can all be shocked, dismayed, and fall into the doldrums for a day or so, and then something inside us tells us that we have to get back to work.
However, I saw a message from a young writer this morning that said, “I found out that, due to the Covid19 outbreak, as of today I no longer have a job. I want to sit down and write while I’m in isolation, but I’m so worried that that is not the responsible thing to do, I can’t focus. I should be out looking for a job.”
I suspect that a lot of writers have those kinds of worries, and as I say, “Stress kills creativity.” You might find it a little tougher to write right now.
Or maybe not. You can look for jobs electronically, and if you’re in a small rural area like mine, it will take all of an hour a day. So what are you going to do with the other fourteen hours that you’re awake?
I think of writing as an investment in myself. That’s how I make money, by investing in myself. Some projects make a lot of money, some don’t make much at all. I wrote a short story a few weeks ago, for example, that probably didn’t make me $20 per hour. I had a lot of fun doing it, and I’d do it again in a minute. It relieves stress, gets something accomplished, and acts as an advertisement for my work, but it’s nowhere near my minimum hourly rate. Still, a lot of people only dream of making $20 per hour.
But it does bring up a difficulty that authors have: determining the worth of a project. Some writing projects have made me a lot of money. For example, years ago I wrote a movie tie-in novel. The advance for the novel was about $60,000, and I figured it would take about 200 hours to write, so I made something on the order of $300 per hour. I hoped that it might even make some royalties.
Sure enough, it made far more in royalties than anticipated. I still get small checks for it, twenty years later, and currently, I figure that I made over $2000 an hour on that project.
You see, with a novel, over its life, it can grow and dwindle in popularity around the world. A novel that doesn’t look like it’s worth much can suddenly become popular.
One friend, years ago, wrote some vampire novels that didn’t do well in the US. They sold so poorly, she gave up writing for a time, but she sold the foreign rights in Romania and became a #1 bestseller—and made millions. I’ve seen other friends do this in Japan, Germany, and the UK.
Then you have books that get turned into movies, and perhaps a book that you thought was dead twenty years ago comes roaring back to life.
So when you’re writing, you’re investing in an unpredictable future. You don’t know what you might get out of it, but you are investing in your dreams.
JK Rowling was a divorcee, living on the dole and raising her children when she wrote Harry Potter. When she finally found a publisher for her book—after 12 rejections—the editor was kind enough to call her and give her some advice. “Go and get a real job,” he said. “You can’t support yourself by writing middle-grade books.”
Yet her books became wildly popular. She’s sold over 120 million copies of Harry Potter. For every hour that she invested in writing that book, she has made over a million dollars.
Forget working in a coffee shop. I’d rather write. It’s both more fun and more lucrative. The problem is, you don’t know when you’ll get paid.
So if you’re lucky enough to be hunkered down during the next couple of weeks, put your faith in yourself. If you look at other people’s books and think, “I can do better than this,” you’re probably right. That’s your inner critic telling you to try.
Look for a job online for an hour if you must, but then relax and begin building your new future. That is being both resilient and responsible. Write a big book, one that will be loved by millions. Go ahead and beat J.K. Rowling!
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