What happens after you quit your job to write…
When I quit my job and spent a year writing there was a lot of stories available online about taking the plunge and doing what I had chosen to do.
However, there did not seem to be a lot of articles written from where I am now; two years down the line and back at work. It’s not a bad place, but it’s not a storyline heading for Hollywood anytime soon.
I spent a glorious year writing, I completed a novel, a screenplay and a TV pilot. At the end of my year I felt like I was making progress. I had self-published my novel, it had some good reviews and sales were going up. The TV pilot had got me a few coffee meetings with agents and some replies from a few TV production companies and the film was selected for a round table read through by a production company. So far so good, but it wasn’t paying the bills.
I also had a difficult thought in my head, ‘You can justify taking one year off, but two?’ I was trying to keep a career going as well, you know - just in case.
So I cut the gas on my journey and played safe and got a job. It was cool, I said. I would get up at 6, write for an hour then work a full day and then go do Bikram Yoga in the evening. I was giving up nothing and would be able to do two things at once. I found out I can’t do two things at the same time, certainly not well anyway. If I tried to focus on writing my paying job suffered, and vice versa. I never once got up at six, to write at least. And Yoga fell by the wayside fairly early doors at the nearest hurdle. I don’t see myself as the kind of person who easily quits, which made it harder to swallow actually.
The part that knots your stomach is the feeling of having let others down, so many people were excited when I took time off, I worry that I’ve gone from an example of what was possible to a lesson in why you shouldn’t take the plunge.
However… just before it all gets too depressing…
My feature script was recently been optioned by a production company and fingers crossed with a little luck and some rewrites it might actually get made. That wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t taken that time off. The scripts been put on hold for the moment, but my script was discussed at Cannes film festival, and who knows where it will end up, possibly at a cinema near you.
A year after publishing my novel, sales have started to go up. Amazingly once I got a professional cover designed, and stopped using the one with a photo that I took on my iPhone outside my house; what a surprise right? Sales have picked up and I’ve been finding readers in the US, Australia as well as even some on Madagascar!
I keep coming back to something I heard at the London Book Fair at the Self-Publishing arena, ‘What you need to decide on is what your goal is.’ You can move the goal posts later, but right now what is your goal. Mine was to take some time out and write the novel I wanted to write. And I did that. The novel hasn’t sold a million copies, it has however sold several hundred and counting. And what’s more people I’ve never met not only have read it, but took the time to e-mail me and inform me they enjoyed my work and that’s a feeling that never diminishes, unlike fame, money and plaudits, or so I am told.
However, if I had never taken my year off and finished my novel, I’d never have been able to watch my Father proudly use his speech at his 70th birthday to plug my book. That’s a memory which makes it all worth it.
Originally published at www.tomsavageauthor.com on January 22, 2016.
