It never fails.
You’re in a creative profession, and you find yourself in a position where you need money. Something unforeseen happened: your spouse lost your job. The kid needs braces. The shower caved in when your thirteen year old leaned on it.
We’ve all been there, and we know the inevitable result, right? Your brain locks down tighter than a tupperware in a commercial. All of a sudden, there’s nothing you can do except try to get something out of this dry well. with an effort akin to trying to squeeze blood out of a stone.
And in the mean time, things keep getting worse, and you get more desperate and your brain keeps locking down tighter.
I’ve been there. I think we’ve all been there.
1- Take a deep breath. This is normal.
2- Put down the want ads for Walmart. No. Seriously. Unless you guys are on your last meal, please consider what Walmart — or similar — will do.
Okay, no. Look, this warrants a whole other subheading so here we go.
a) If you have a specialty that you can find a job quickly and it’s high paid enough that you’re not working crazy hours, it might be worth to do it. It didn’t work spectacularly well for me when I did it, because it was teaching and teaching always pulls from the same place as writing. but it was enough to keep us out of trouble for six months.
b) If you don’t have a specialty and can only manage to get something like retail, the calculus is more complicated. We’ve all done it in need, but make sure you’re going to make enough to get you through, or that you can get your family to pitch in or something so you have enough brain to write.
c) If someone else in the family can pitch in with something, even a little, it might make it so you have some time to write and really supplement your income.
3- Don’t blame yourself. That’s extra emotional load you don’t have to carry. Anxiety stopping creativity is normal. It’s not your fault. stop dining on guilt. It’s just the way humans are wired.
4- Do what you can. Sometimes, just do a little bit. A sentence here. A sentence there. Sometimes that’s enough for your creativity to let go of the iron grip on block.
5 – If you are the praying kind, pray. If you can trust G-d to fix it it, do so. It helps. I know it’s very hard to trust in those circumstances. I was blocked hard for four years.
6- If you can paint-by-numbers and write on easy mode, do so. Let me remind you there are people making a living from Jane Austen Fanfic. If you have something similar you can do without a brain or high creativity and which will bring you money, do so.
This is all I have. Sometimes the creativity locks tight and there’s nothing you can do to make it go again. It is what it is. What you can do is what you can do.
You’re not a machine. Affirmations are nt a vending machine. Neither is prayer. And the black moment is only followed by triumph in stories because we writers cheat.
You do what you can do. The best you can do. And don’t beat yourself up.
You’re only human.
Mad Genius Club 
32 responses to “How Do You Go On?”
7. Driving Uber or Lyft is not a long term solution.
Sigh No. It’s not. And I can’t help. And I wish I could, my friend.
I’m just pointing it out. However, it *can* be a short term solution, or an assist, if you live in or near a decent market… just don’t get stuck in it.
Tech writing should be considered. That’s my go-to for quick income. It pays well – $30 – $55 per hour, typically.
But I’m not technically oriented you say. Doesn’t matter. Most tech writing is translating garble into understandable English. Literally translating from jargon to English.
If you can write science fiction you will prosper as a tech writing. If you can write fantasy – so long as you don’t think H. P. Lovecraft rather than L. Sprague de Camp is the style to emulate – you can do tech writing.
There is a lot of remote work available. It is also episodic. Some company wants manuals or user’s guides written – in and out. 3 month to 9 month gigs are pretty typical.
Plus, it’s writing. Any writing improves your future writing.
How do you find those?
Right? that’s my question. I used to be a scientific translator. It’s not like I can’t do that.
I am at the day job right now, and all my job search stuff is on my personal workstation. I’ll post a list of job boards that worked for me when I get home.
If you want Sarah, I can do a guest post on tech writing as an income source, either here or at your blog. You know who I am. I’ve reviewed enough of your books.
sure. Possibly here. I probably DO know who you are but not what your real name is associated with this handle.
Check Epoch Times – Odd Magic review.
Oh. Of course.
I’d be very interested in seeing about this.
I would suggest DICE.com It’s a good place to look for tech jobs. I used them a lot when I was working tech. Not sure if that’s the place for tech writing, but probably worth a look.
I can think of a few tech products (and worked on one or two) where tech writing in the Lovecraft style would be appropriate.
[Sits back and thinks of the caution/warning boxes…] 🙂 🙂 🙂
Hmmm, user’s manuals a lå Lovecraft…could be a market for those! 😛
Trust me. There are a lot of manuals a la Lovecraft’s writing style. Most of my tech writing work seems to be fixing them.
And a death of a friend, family or pet will zonk you out far longer than you expect and will pop up at unexpected times weeks, months or even years after you think you’ve processed everything, not just right after the loss. And loss of job, loss of possibility, loss of ability, loss of a dream, all have to be processed as grief by our confused brains, just like having to call a bill collector is just as anxiety inducing as facing down a raging tiger for some people.
I feel the better/greater an imagination you have, the better writer you are, and the worse your anxiety/grief/separation of reality-fantasy-worry will be. (You’ll also likely be a better manifestor if you want to try that).
Everything else said? Spot on!
I just lost a month plus of writing cause I lost my Dog of 13 years. And I’m in the middle of a hot series. Yeah, financially that wasn’t good, but what can you do?
So sorry for your loss. Yes, a tiny hole is left, and all the creativity runs out it until it finally grows a scab over it.
@TiffanyG (Since I still haven’t swapped browsers) Writing can also be a way to process that. Granted, it won’t be part of whatever wip you were doing before the meteor hit, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth writing; just a different story.
Aristotle’s theory was art was for learning how to deal with horrible stuff by experiencing it at a safe distance. Lived through it at a decidedly unsafe diatance? Try writing it out.
From Dad’s perspective, he wants me to get a Real Job(TM), preferably with the State of California, because he wants me to get a CalPERS pension and have that money coming in when I get older.
The problem is that most of the entry-level State job that I can find are terrible in many ways. And I’d have to survive at least a year during the probationary period to try and find something better.
Jobs in the writing field have been dying because of Large Language Model (aka “AI”) writing packages. Which make people getting ad copy happy because they can get the exact same grey wallpaper paste as everyone else. Jobs anywhere else are insane, and I looked at Uber/Lyft for just long enough to realize that I don’t want to be a part of the gig economy. Feels too much like piecework and we know how that goes.
Coming up on the first anniversary of Mom’s death. First real birthday Dad has had in nearly three years. Mother’s Day.
I’m not stressed out that I can’t write, but I know that I’m getting close to that point…
As far as those promised pensions – what can’t be paid won’t. Or in inflation adjusted dollars not as great as you think.
I know several workers in state government, both in TX and AL, and that’s a common delusion: “the state owes me and the state WILL pay, with COLA, no matter what taxes have to be raised to.”
They may not explicitly state that last clause, but that’s ALWAYS at least implied.
I’m honestly wondering how bad California is going to crash when the crash happens. Especially since the remaining big industries (i.e. Entertainment and Tech) are either failing or getting out of the state as quickly as they can.
The collapse won’t be complete, mind you-when two of the largest ports on the West Coast are here, there will still be money coming in. But the chaos will be…interesting.
I made that choice back in 2001. Took a pay cut to work at a California Community College. The pay improved greatly over time, and I stayed for a little less than 20 years. And I retired with a good pension. But the trade off was working in a bureaucratic environment, subject to State rules. YMMV.
Okay, here are sites where I have found different tech writing jobs over the last 15-20 years (no urls, because there are enough to get it binned as potential spam:
My favorite (techwriterjobs-dot-com) seems to have evaporated. A shame. My advice is avoid all job search sites that charge a fee. You are the product, not the jobs.
Use the keywords technical writer (or translator, if that is your gig). Most site let you choose a search locations. You can opt for remote on most, although my advice is try your local area, too. Some of them are remote and hybrid. You are likely to be wanting contract work, and look for short term contracts. Recruiters find those harder to fill.
At this point I’ll leave the job hunting as an exercise for the reader. I can do a whole post on how to make yourself an attractive candidate for temporary tech writing jobs, and may in the future.
Not that I’d do it, but I keep seeing YT vids of people saying they make buckets of money putting out worthless or blank books on Amazon. Why is there a market for that? If you can do it, why not. I guess. I’ll just keep working on novels and short stories that no one wants to read….
It was for a long time. it is not. The market? It’s like the blank books of the seventies. Pretty cover, blank pages to write in.
“The market? It’s like the blank books of the seventies. Pretty cover, blank pages to write in.”
Oh, you mean the ones titled, “The Best in Leftist Thought.”
LOL. No. It’s notebooks, really.
I did some minor tech writing for Ford and Subaru after I retired from the military many moons ago. I found it…awful. I now write for fun and have created a world of my own with a hero/lucky bum staggering through twelve books. I may publish them at some future time but I still have some anguish to overcome. My wife, bless her, harped on me for years to write. When she was diagnosed with ALS in 2020, I started to humor her. She passed in the middle of chapter 14 of Book four and I have been plugging along writing as the mood hits me. I suppose I need to hire an illustrator and, possibly a true editor but I quail at the bureaucracy task of copywriting.
Oh, unless we get into terrible trouble, I don’t intend to do it. I can’t do translation anymore. Lost all the languages from dis-use.
bureaucracy should have been bureaucratic.