Ok, to start this off with total honesty, today is not Day 1. I would say this is somewhere between Day 3 and Year 5. But for all my previous musings about how I would like to live and the type of work I would like to do, this document marks a significant change…

This may not be Day 1 of me desiring to change what I do, but this is Day 1 of me actually working towards doing it.

This document, and this day, which we shall now call 1, marks the start of me making real steps towards changing what I do. No more wishing, no more looking at friends who love their jobs with envy, no more “one day I will write a book”. How many people die with those words still on their tongue? No. No one gets handed the perfect job, no one simply walks into the life they want. They work for it, and push themselves forward in the direction they want to go. And this is step one of me finally doing that.

So, where am I at right now

Currently, I am working a job that pays the bills. It’s a good job, some might say a great job, and when I started I was hoping this would be it- the forever job I was looking for. But 2 years in, I’ve found something is still missing…

For a little context, here are the Cliff Notes on the last few years of my life. I am an ex-pat from the UK who moved to Canada about 7 years ago. Since I left England in 2013, I have been bouncing around the world working as a snowboard instructor and part time bartender/barista, pretty much any job that allowed me to live in the places that I wanted to live. This work was fun, at the time, but not what you would consider a career. There was no longevity to any of these jobs, no long term aspirations, they were simply jobs that paid the rent, paid for new ski gear and paid for the next plane ticket.

This was great, for a time, but eventually, I decided I wanted to put down some roots, stay in one place for longer than 6 months at a time. I spent the next 3 years working towards residency in Canada; a fun and time consuming process those of you in the ex-pat community will know all about. After years of paperwork and jumping through government hoops, I got a fancy new PR card in the mail!

So, what now? I had been working in the hospitality/tourism industry for my entire life, and that shiny little card now meant I was free to work wherever I wanted, do whatever I wanted. And so the existential life questions begin. Where do I want to live? What do I want to do? And an even bigger question… How am I going to do it?

Long story short, I went back to school, got some new qualifications and applied for a job I had always thought would be exciting. It paid well, or at least better than I was used to, and it had the one thing I thought I wanted: career growth. A hierarchy to work up, achievements to work towards. Somewhere to go within your field so you are not simply doing the same job over and over. In short: It was a career rather than just a job.

But even after this change, after finally moving out of the hospitality/tourism sector, after getting a stable job, with a continuous contract, a uniform, a union- all the things I felt I was missing out on before, even after all this… it still feels like something is missing. The work can be fulfilling, my coworkers fun and the paycheck reasonable, but there is still a part of me that feels restless. Fells like this is just another step on the way to something better.

Over the years I have come to the conclusion that change is the most important catalyst for happiness in life. I live by the idea that if you are not happy, change something. Change where you live, change your relationship, change your job, change your clothes, change your hair colour. Changing something small, or something big, can make the rest of it fall into place.

So taking this mantra to heart, it feels like another big change is needed right now, to get all the little pieces of my life clicking together the way they should, and step into a career that’s more than just work I don’t mind doing, but rather, work I love.

where to go from here

That is the big question. I have decided I want to make a change, so now what?

One benefit of having had so many different jobs in my life, lived in so many countries and moved every 6 months for the past 10 years, is that I can look at everything I have done in the past, all my experiences, good and bad, and find the things I enjoyed and the things I didn’t. Try to pinpoint the places I felt at home, the things that made me happy, and see if I can incorporate those into the next step of this journey.

One thing I have consistently enjoyed doing throughout my life is writing. Back in school, I used to set myself up in the garden and write endless reams of (utter garbage) fan-fiction, spinning ludicrous plots and never finishing a damn thing, but getting lost for hours in writing, in a way I have never been able to do with anything else. At university (I have a bachelor’s degree in music, no it’s not useful, but yes it was fun getting it) the only assignments I genuinely enjoyed were long essays about music history, when I always went over the word limit, waxing lyrical about the wonders of the Smashing Pumpkins or the political importance of Bruce Springsteen. Writing in all its forms; academic, fiction, or stream-of-consciousness, has always been something that brings me joy. I have returned to writing over the years, in all its forms, and have consistently found it puts a smile on my face, makes me forget time, makes me proud to have created something that wasn’t there before.

Taking stock of where I am right now, of what I want from life and where I want my career to take me, I think this might be the answer. I want to be creative, I want to make things, I want to craft stories. I want to write.

Having come to this conclusion, or maybe having known this all along but finally being able to acknowledge it, how am I to go about the seemingly impossible task of making a living from writing?

I have always told myself “one day I will write a book”, but like most things that “will happen one day” I am no closer to making that a reality today than I was 5 years ago. My hard drive is full of half finished stories, thoughts and ideas waiting to be made into something whole, and they remain that way; waiting, unfinished, for this fantastical day when I will sit down and magically produce a manuscript.

But the seemingly unattainable goal of writing a novel is not the only way to ‘make a living’ from writing. Yes, one day I will finish my work in progress, (the ominous WIP for any other writers out there) and yes, one day all those plot lines and characters and worlds and scenes that have been living rent free in my head for years will have a place to call home, but for now, for right now, I want to write every day and get paid to do so.

How to make It happen

So, right now, I have a dream career in mind, a very vague plan to “make a living from writing”, and, much like a Brit driving off the ferry and getting to a French roundabout for the first time, I have no idea which direction to go to make that happen.

I am still very much in the dark when it comes to understanding the world of writing and how different writers make a living, so stage 1 of this journey we will call the research phase.

This has already started with a quick google of “freelance writing jobs” and honestly has left me a little disheartened to see the only thing that caught my eye was “resume writing services” which isn’t really what I am looking for. But fear not, I won’t let the dream end there. A more in-depth search is needed; into what types of jobs are out there, how people go about getting them, what certain clients are looking for in writers, and what sorts of things get published in what sorts of places. Generally speaking, I need to have a look at the kinds of things I like to read, find out who writes them, what else they do and how they got to where they are. Luckily a close friend of mine is a freelance travel writer, so soon, once I have more of an understanding of where I want to go, I will pick her brain about how she finds clients, how she markets herself etc.

A fruitful search yesterday led me to an article in Dragon+: an interview with one of their senior game designers about what she does and how she got into the career. A perfect source of information for me at this stage. I also spent a little time on DMs Guild, a website where people publish their own D&D campaigns, and I plan to spend longer going through their content, seeing the types of things people create and what goes into making them.

Stage 2, which will happen concurrently with stage 1, is titled ‘Getting Better’. Writing for my own eyes is one thing, writing for someone else is completely different. Add to that writing for a brief, writing to a word count, writing for the web, including ‘key words’ and SEO (whatever that means)… and you’ve got a whole new ballgame.

Stage 2 has two parts. Firstly, there is getting my writing better. This means understanding grammar, punctuation, sentence structure, passive voice, clarity, things that make your writing easier for a reader to follow, or make them put down your work at sentence one.

As part of improving my writing, I challenged myself to write 300’000 words this year, or as Stephen King would say “get the bad words out”. I started strong in January… and now we are in June and I am only at 21’300. Clearly, one of my big issues with writing is following through.

The second part of stage 2 will hopefully fix this issue with formal education. Yes, I can, and will, get better by simply writing more, but attending a formally structured course will not only force me to perform to a deadline and commit to completing something, but it will give me real time feedback on where I am at, and what I can do to improve. No, I don’t want to go back to university for 4 years to get a creative writing degree (although I’m not completely against the idea) but I do want to do some form of formal education to focus my energy, give me a tangible goal to work towards, and to force myself to make that step forward towards writing as a real career.

UBC online offers a few different courses on ‘Professional Writing’, which already make me excited by just the name. Professional writing sounds like something achievable, attainable. Their fully online course on Freelance Writing is running in September, and is an 8 week course covering an introduction to the world of freelance writing. Perfect. They also run a Content Marketing course, and a course on specifically writing for the web, all of which seem like a good investment.

Skill Share is also a good option, and other similar online learning platforms, and I will look into more of these over the next few months before the UBC course in September (fulfilling more of stage 1: research). UBC also run courses called “Write Well” that focus specifically on grammar, process and practice, style etc, which are already on my list of things to help with getting better at writing in general.

Do I need to attend a writing course? No. I am sure I could learn most of what they teach through online research and trial and error, but what it will do is focus me, give me a goal to work towards, a hard deadline by which to complete things, and hopefully give me my first stepping stone towards making writing for work an actual reality. No, I don’t think it will magically get me a job, or make me a better writer overnight, but the idea of focusing on my writing as a marketable thing, of taking my writing off my hard drive and out into the world, makes me more excited that I have been about any project for a long time. Writing has always been something I do just for me, and the idea of taking what I already do and making it into something I can do more, and something I can do for a living, makes me want to quit my job right now and start doing it straight away.

Sensible decision dictates otherwise, but this feeling I have right now, this excitement, this anticipation, this is what I want to focus on. This is what I want to cultivate. I sat down at my computer and started writing this today, and it’s been 3.5 hours already, I’ve barely looked up from my computer and haven’t looked at my phone once. This is what I want to do. Something that excites me, something that fills my brain, something that lets me create things. Something that I genuinely want to do with my time, and something I would be doing anyway, even if I wasn’t getting paid.

I’ve always rejected the old adage, that “if you love your job you never work a day in your life”. In every job there will be aspects of the work you don’t enjoy; A professional athlete has to talk to the press after a losing game, a rockstar has to spend months on the road away from their family. But if you can swing the percentages, and enjoy your work 80% of the time, you’re winning the game.

The plan

So this is where we stand. We have a three part plan:

Over the next few months, I will be studying and working, researching and writing when I can, and hopefully putting aside at least one day a week to do just those things. I don’t want this energy, this excitement to flicker out and lead to nothing, I want to make this happen. I will make this happen.

So, that is why I am calling this Day 1.

Not because this is the first day I have ever thought of wanting to write as a career. Not because this is the first day I realized that another career change is in my future. No. This is Day 1, because this is the first day when I am seeing my future as a writer as a reality. I am seeing it not as a pipe dream, but as something I can and will achieve. And from this day, all the steps I will be taking will be working towards writing as a tangible, achievable goal, not as a “one day” dream.

Bring on day 2