Somebody on Quora asked:
How can one slowly ease out of their day job and make money as a full-time writer?
I answered:
The truth is that it’s very difficult (I did this once).
Why?
Leaving a full-time job without a substantial amount of freelance work on your plate is too much financial risk for most people to take.
Which means that, for a period, you have to work your full time job and freelance at nights and weekends until you have enough work to take the plunge — which means, essentially, that you will be working progressively more hours as your responsibilities at the day job grow and your book of business does too (hopefully). A good time to start taking a B12 supplement to avoid going prematurely gray!
I did this for two years and can also tell you that it gets seriously tiring and depressing. Your friends want to have a beer with you in the middle of the afternoon on the weekend? You can’t — because you use your weekends to work. But wait, don’t you work an office and use the weekends to recuperate like the rest of the world? No, you have to do both!
The real question worth thinking about is how to make this easier?
Personally, I would love to live somewhere really cheap for a while — perhaps in the countryside of a developed country with a low cost of living, like in Eastern Europe. Otherwise, I’m not really sure there’s a way around this conundrum.
This is one of the many aspects of freelancing that nobody talks about, by the way, so thank you for asking the question!
(ETA: I am Jewish and try to keep the Shabbat/Sabbath which means that I never work from after sundown on Friday to the same time period on Saturday. So although I have worked six days a week for years, I never work seven – save for a couple of hours work some Saturday nights to tie up loose ends / get a head start on the next week. I’m convinced that this alone has saved me from insanity!)
