I share a little bit on our home page about my jobs before I started to write for a living. While they were not always bad, I did find that I found the time away from my family, the loss of control over my life, and the necessity of listening to someone else (often in a position due more to seniority or friendship than any inherent capabilities) a real drag. I had always dreamed of a career where I could work from home doing something I loved; most of all I wanted to write for a living!

I decided to take this dream and turn it into reality a couple of years ago. I started to read a lot of books on how to make money writing for a living, but didn’t find very much useful advice. One piece of advice that I did find in every book, though, and that I found to be very true, was that if you have bills to pay and mouths to feed you need to come up with a solid plan when you decide to write for a living.

For a lot of people, this means following the old cliché “Don’t quit your day job”. Instead of the pejorative way in which this phrase is used, think of it as a positive: don’t quit your day job yet, but once you build up a solid client base and learn the ropes of your writing career, you will be able to go to part time and eventually leave the 9 to 5 scene (or whichever shift you happen to work on) for good.

Once you get your writing career started a little bit, you will quickly find out whether or not you are cut out for it. Believe it or not, once you make the decision to write for a living it is not all bliss. You have to worry about dry periods where you don’t quite make what you were hoping to, and you have to be able to work fast while still turning in quality pieces (that’s for writing on the Internet, writing for land based publications is a little bit different; I came across a good article on writing recently, and I really think it highlights the difference in the mediums very well. Almost everything that works for land based publications will prove detrimental on the web!).

Writing quickly enough to make the job worthwhile, in particular, can be what makes or breaks a career freelance writing for the Internet. I knew that I could research and write quality pieces very quickly, largely due to my university career. In fact, I knew that I worked best when I was up against a tight deadline and had no choice but to write quickly! Many writers don’t go to university (in fact some may tell you that this can be detrimental, although I haven’t found that to be the case at all), so the only way to tell if writing for a living is viable option for you is through a few assignments.

I’ve said it in another article, and I will say it again here: if you can’t make as much per hour writing as you could with a typical job, then it might not be worth it to write as a career. There is more to it than that, of course, but in the end whether or not you really can write for a living will come down to money.