As you may have noticed, here at D2D we’ve moved away from following certain themes and topics, so that we could maintain a more conversational, casual flow of discussion here.

It was a great idea, really. Before, when we were posting based on specific themes, I’d see of all kinds of fantastic resources and then kill myself trying to think of a way to fit them into the topic of the month. Or I’d have an idea for a post that seemed especially timely or helpful, but then I’d file it away to post about later, when it fit the theme du jour. (I never did. They never did.)

Several years ago, before I’d gotten serious about my freelancing career, I was talking with somebody about whether or not I REALLY wanted to write for magazines.

"I mean, I love to write," I said. "I’d love to write for a living. But I want to write about what I WANT to write about, not what somebody ELSE tells me I have to write about. I don’t want anyone else telling me what to dooooooo." 

Somewhere along the line, though, I gave in, and now have even become so accustomed to writing for others that writing for myself no longer comes as naturally as it once did. Perhaps I simply don’t have the time, brainpower or creativity left to let a flood of ideas flow from my fingertips after filing how-to stories on contracted, assigned topics.

Once upon a time, I was a prolific blogger (long before D2D or any of my current blogs, I had a regularly-updated personal blog). My entries were fun and off-the-cuff and plentiful. And essays; I was forever starting (and sometimes even finishing) essays about a variety of topics. And I dabbled in poetry and half-written short stories and even plays. On the other hand, I had a very hard time coming up with ideas that anyone else might like to buy. I had a hard time tailoring my early articles to the markets I was writing for. I was overflowing with stuff I wanted to write. The only problem was that much of it wasn’t publishable.

There’s that tradeoff thing again. Most of us already know that the life of a working writer–especially a working writer with children–doesn’t usually mean a life of luxurious creativity, choosing only the projects one feels passionate about, and having plenty of time for everything else in our lives–being there for our children for all of their waking moments, practicing yoga for two hours a day, and perhaps a hobby, like breeding and training hairless guinea pigs for profit. We can have SOME of these things, and on a good day, we might manage to squeeze it all in, but day in and day out, something’s gotta give. And so it goes with our careers. Last year I was giving a talk to a group of college students in a writing for publication class, and I told them "When you’re first starting out, you have to make a choice: Either you can write only what you want to, when you want to, on the topics that you want to; OR, you can make a living at this." Okay, so it’s possible you could make a million dollars off your first novel, but you’d STILL have to put in a lot of time before you see a dime. There’s always a tradeoff, and I think we have to be prepared to make it when we are getting started. It helps to know, very specifically, what your career goals are. Somebody who wants to make a name for herself writing serious think-pieces for the Atlantic should probably choose a different path from someone who wants to pay the bills by writing advertorials. And if you’re moving your career along in a certain direction, the tradeoff is that you may just not have as much time or energy left for other things.

But isn’t it great? We can choose! And we can have the writing life and career that works for us right now and a year from now, whether that means we want to pen the occasional story when we can take a moment out of raising our families, or whether we’re hoping to build a career writing for magazines. If tomorrow I decided that I was tired of writing as my main source of income, I could get a different job and still write essays and stories and even magazine articles only on topics that move and excite me. I’m a writer for life, but I can choose the way writing fits into my day-to-day existence right now and change it later.

I don’t know about you, but I think that’s exciting. It means I can be many things during my lifetime. It means that the novel I have always felt is in me somewhere has time to percolate until I’m in a place in my life that I can get it down. Making a choice sometimes feels like giving something up, but I like to think that I’m just making room in my future life for whatever I can’t do now.

And look–I managed to write a whole blog post, without anyone telling me what to do. See? Turns out I’ve still got it

–Happy writing!

Meagan