I Took Time off of Work to Write My Book

I turned in my resignation to pursue a dream. My dream is—and has been for years—to be able to make a living by writing books, to sustain myself, financially from it. I never thought that it would be necessary to quit my job. I thought I could cobble enough writing time while working my 8-to-5, to get closer to my dream. It seemed doable. It seemed simple enough. But it hasn’t been.

Throughout my career, my dream has hung over me, shadowing my decisions. It led me into a career in ad writing, marketing, and communications. Writing and editing have been the bedrock of most of my jobs. No coincidence there. It’s not that I haven’t enjoyed it or found it dissatisfying. It’s been a great experience, and I’m certainly proud of what I do at work. I just knew that it was time to move my life in a new direction.

During my mass-transit commute, mornings, evenings, and weekends, I’ve spent time working on fiction or screenwriting. I’ve had quite a few start-stop projects. Too many to count. But there was a turning point, when I wrote and helped produce a 12-episode web series in 2008. It was a body of “published” work, and it had a small group of very loyal followers. The opportunity raised my confidence about my writing abilities beyond the corporate brochures and internal communications that I cranked out for corporate America. But nothing happened after that. I wasn’t expecting a writing team at HBO to stumble upon the web series and say, “Her! We want her. No, we need her!” Though, that sure would’ve been nice. So I kept writing.

I finished a novel manuscript a few years ago. I woke up 30 minutes before work every day for over a year to write it. The finished product was decent, but definitely not great.
I knew it needed work before I could shop it around to literary agents. I sent it to a freelance editor who gave me great advice. Most of all, I was happy to learn how much she genuinely liked reading the story. I worked on the rewriting process. I surprised myself by doing a genre switch, converting it from a novel format to a romantic comedy screenplay. I got halfway through, and then I started working on a historical romance novel, my current work-in-progress.

Sometime during the three years between the rom-com rewrite and the beginning of the historical romance manuscript, I met a great guy and got married. With his support, it was easier to make the decision to take some time off and work on my novel. It was tough putting in my notice at work. A mind-shift had to occur before handing in the resignation. I’d been doing the same thing for so long—focusing on my job and treating my writing as a hobby—that I had to reprogram my thinking.

I had to think back to how I felt years ago when I took the job. This is going to be my last job, I had told myself, because I want my writing to take off. I’m going to work on my hobby until it becomes my next “job.” I put in a lot of hours, a whole lot of time, but I never reached my main goal. I finally realized that it was time to take the full leap of faith—no more of this part-time, on-the-side, hobby stuff. I needed to go all-in. Because my dream deserves this chance. Because sometimes you have to quit something to raise your chance of success.

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