As someone who did the opposite (and as writers go, I was “successful” — I reached the six figure mark and everything), I’m not going to say “don’t do this” — because that’s unfairly glib, but I would say to consider your options.
I’ve found that my skills as a writer and editor (and being good at communications in general), are valued much more in my current job (I work in DevRel and intersect engineering and product) than I ever expected.
Rather than leaving tech to turn to writing, perhaps you could find opportunities in your current job to write. Even something as seemingly benign as documentation is something! (And in truth, we need more good writers and editors working on documentation. It’s not sexy but it impacts so many people and often the difference between good and bad documentation is the ability of the writer/editor.)
I’m also a big fan of scratching my creative itch with side-projects and then seeing if that passion leads you to wanting to do something full time. That’s what led me to professional writing to begin with.
Rather than leaving tech to turn to writing, perhaps you could find opportunities in your current job to write. Even something as seemingly benign as documentation is something! (And in truth, we need more good writers and editors working on documentation. It’s not sexy but it impacts so many people and often the difference between good and bad documentation is the ability of the writer/editor.)
Great advice! I'd take it a step further: we need more good writers working on the documentation that's needed before the code is written. Call it Business Requirements, Functional Specs, Technical Specs, Stories, or whatever, almost everyone sucks at it and almost every project suffers by the lack of it. No one reads documentation written after the fact (it's not sexy), but projects are saved and careers are made by those who can write anything that helps the people actually building the software. I may be a little weird, but I think that's very sexy.
100% this. There are a lot of opportunities for creative work in content marketing, devrel, and so forth. Writing, video, etc. Also a great way to bridge with doing if that’s your thing.
It’s obviously not the same as literary fiction, etc. But it can be a good gig. If you have some other particular interest do it as a hobby/sideline.
One downside is that you may not be credited but even that’s not always a given. I get a byline for most external things I write as part of my job.
Write as a leisure pursuit as the sibling comment says, but also consider writing short <10k short episodic stuff and put it on Kindle. As an experiment I published something under a pseudonym (no, not telling you) that was thrown together a few years back largely to see how quickly I could do it, and a single work will only make you money if you're a fantastic writer and do a lot of work to market it (or get someone, like a publisher, to do it for you)
But multiple shorter pieces gives more visibility and cross promotion opportunities, as if you're lucky your readers like one to go on to buy more, and the more you have on sale, the bigger the average payoff per converted fan becomes. It also lets you place it at a price point that is very low risk for people, and as you build up a back catalog you can further expand it by selling collections.
My experiment didn't exactly pay great, but it did pay, and importantly it keeps selling in small numbers several years later. At this rate, in a few years my hourly pay for writing it will actually be decent... See that both as encouragement and a warning that this is not a "get rich quick" approach.
I think if you want to commit to it but don't feel like being a starving writer on an elusive quest for a best seller, start writing short stuff (be it manuals, DIY guides, novellas, collections of poems are whatever you want) as a sideline and build up a back catalog and income stream from it. See every new thing you write as another tiny little sales vehicle for your full back catalog, rather than expect to get a sudden payday from every one thing. It keeps the commitment low - you can write as little or as much as you like - and it lets you build up an income stream until it seems realistic to make it your job as opposed to a side income.
I've been toying with the idea that the time spent creating by artists (musicians, creative writers, fine arts, indy game devs) is valued at $0 by society. Because there have always been an will always be people who do it for $0. What is valued and rewarded is the effort involved in marketing, distribution, performance and all those bits people don't want to do for free but have too. If you want art to pay as a full time job, you need to (at least) put in full time hours to the 'work' part and be capable of doing them at a somewhat professional level. It kind of justifies why publishers, galleries and similar still exist, despite this being the age of direct creator -> consumer sales. You are often better off getting a day job and outsourcing the boring parts of your hobby to a publisher or paying gallery commissions.
I think you're mostly right. We value specific output, not the time that went into it, and so we're prepared to pay nothing for the bulk of what is created, but a lot for a tiny little proportion.
With the caveat that you can make a lot of this pay reasonably well if you're willing to see your hobby as a craft where there is a trade off between quality and effort as opposed to art. E.g. I can write reasonably well, better in my native Norwegian than in English, but I realize that to reach a level that would let me write a novel that a "real" publisher would be prepared to publish, for example, would take a massive amount of effort with no guarantee of ever achieving it, and publishing something in Norwegian would be less likely to earn me anything than getting published in English.
But if I'm prepared to churn out quarter-novel sized English-language serialized novellas for Kindle, I'd have a decent shot at making a living at it (though not anywhere near my current salary), I think, based on my experience and the assumption that I'd need to basically churn out 10k words every 1-2 weeks at least. I believe that speed would be sustainable for me, but at a quality level that is at best craft rather than art, and I don't think it'd be sufficiently enjoyable to be worth it.
But some of the most prolific fiction writers do sustain that for a long time, and some manage to gain success that way. E.g. the original "Morgan Kane" series of 83 novels is one of the most successful Norwegian book series of all time, selling a combined ~20 million, despite only about half the books even having been made available in print in English. Most of them were written in about a month each, and while their aggregate number of copies sold over time are high for a Norwegian author, he achieved that through long term notoriety built up over more than a decade of having new novels published every 1-2 months (he wrote other series as well), rather than overnight success - the number of copies sold per book was not that high, and when he "came out of retirement" to write six more books 20-30 years ago, despite his fame, people ridiculed his publisher for doing a 100k first print run for the first of the new books, as 100k is a lot for a western book in a market of 5m people and he was not seen as someone writing high quality best sellers but as someone churning out decent, fun cheap paperbacks that'd take 10+ years to reach those volumes. They were wrong, but they were probably wrong largely due to lots of pent up demand from fans of his back catalog combined with the fact he spent 6 months to a year per novel in the new series rather than rush them out to hit a 1 month deadline.
Incidentally the author of the Morgan Kane series got rich from it, but was also least once, before his latest series, denied entry to the Norwegian Authors Association because one of the criteria was that you needed to have published three novels of sufficient literary quality. The admission committee all agreed he'd done so, but they initially at least couldn't agree on a set of the same three books. I believe they decided in the end it was a sufficiently unique case that he was granted entry anyway.
> We value specific output, not the time that went into it, and so we're prepared to pay nothing for the bulk of what is created, but a lot for a tiny little proportion.
The hard truth is that most aspiring artists are not particularly good. The finished art, no matter the medium, varies in quality by a gargantuan amount, with only a tiny proportion of artists possessing the talent and skills to make something that a sizeable number of people will pay to experience.
As someone wrapping up his Writing MFA, I'd add, first that it's possible to treat writing and making a living as two mutually exclusive problems to solve. With a significant tech or dev background it's possible to work freelance to make a living, while carving out time to write.
And since, second, writing takes years to be good at, this is a great strategy to have anyway. It's highly debateble how long one should persist pursuing writing before giving up. But, I'd guess, most of the "successful" writers of today took 5-18 years of writing before they achieved "success". That is my opinion, but I've heard it said by many other "successful" writers (George Saunders, Toni Morrison, Elizabeth Strout, etc. etc.). Again, "success" != money.
With one caveat: a few (hard to get) MFA programs fully fund (tuition + living stipend) their students (usually in return for teaching). It's one of the few ways to be paid to write for 2-3 years, and admittance to one of those programs is a good goal to strive for, even if you think of those 2-3 years as a break from a tech career. Similarly, the programs where you pay for your MFA are generally poor financial decisions.
If your motivation is commercial rather than leisure, I suspect the answer lies in what you already know from tech.
It's about marketing. It's about finding a niche. It's about building an audience. It's about luck. It's about presentation. It's about finding a product market fit. It's about failing fast. And somewhere down the list of priorities, you'll need to be competent writer.
Doing what everyone else is doing, and expecting to win by the sheer force of brilliance, is probably a bad plan. Fortunately, 99% of your competitors are following that plan. But it does kind of rely on you writing somewhat cynically. Rather than for love of art.
With this huge caveat that I write for fun, so I'm pontificating. Take what I say with a cellar of salt.
At least try it out before, say, quitting your day job. Submit some pieces, get some feedback, go through a few rounds of that. Don't do anything for free, that's horseshit and teaches/proves way less than selling some words.
If your thing's literary fiction then LOL good luck, otherwise you'll probably be fine if you've got a bit of a knack for it, some patience to deal with the business side of it, and can follow directions.
If you're interested, at least, you can try combining the two. I moved into technical writing full-time five years or so ago. I'd been a tech blogger before that, just with my own sporadically-updated blog that I never quite figured out how to monetize despite it having hit what I'd consider "B-list status" (showing up on Techmeme occasionally, linked from bigger blogs, etc.); in an odd way, moving into documentation was monetizing the blog, since a startup came looking for me after their CEO read a few blog posts and liked them.
This doesn't mean giving up creative writing, either; I still do that, and in fact started that first job with "so, uh, two weeks after the date you want me to start, I'm going to be attending a residential writing workshop in Lawrence, Kansas for two weeks; will that be a problem?" (It wasn't, fortunately.)
