Advice for new writers: Live somewhere cheap | Hacker News Reader

Advice for new writers: Live somewhere cheap

patrickrothfuss.com

43 pointspetewarden23 comments

I moved into my mom's basement.

She got a job elsewhere and she needed someone to take care of her house, which is paid for, and her pets and some farm animals. So I quit my job and moved back to my hometown.

It is actually working out really well. I'm living here super cheap, I make enough money coding, and I can focus on my writing.

I call myself a full-time writer now, since I'm writing about 5-9 hours a day.

Even though I am living really frugally, this is one of the best times of my life.

1 hour : 1 day. I love living cheap because it creates miraculous ratios. For every hour I work now, I get one full day in the future to focus 100% on whatever I want. (I'm about to move to latin america to work on some new stuff, and am finishing up a last-minute web/design contract before I go.)

Of course, a good ratio depends not only on living cheap but also getting paid reasonably well for something that doesn't kill you (or your soul).

The first time I got anywhere near this ratio was 8 years ago, but to get it I had to sleep in a tent, wake up at 5 AM and plant trees like a madman on the side of a mountain every day for an entire summer. It was my own personal hell, but then paid for a full year of doing what I loved for free, which then led to the best opportunities of my life, so that I never had to go back to those damned mountains again.

I'm not very good at side projects... I only really get into the zone when I commit myself to something fully. So being able to partition my life into discrete segments of "sell my services" and "build something I care about" is valuable to me.

If you don't feel like living in "the pit," you could just get a full time job that isn't all-consuming. Working an hour or two a night, finishing a first draft of a book only takes a few months. You should then end up spending six months to a year or more revising, especially if you're waiting for readers to get back to you.

For most people the challenge isn't money or time, it's sticking with the project for the year (sometimes several) it takes to produce a manuscript worth submitting.

This applies to product development, too. As 37signals demonstrated, it's not impossible to build a full SaaS product on 10 hours a week: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1605-ask-37signals-how-many-h...

Of course they were lucky on a number of counts for that to actually work out, but really, the big thing they got right was probably motivation. When you're already making a steady income, the push to ship something you've been building on the side is nowhere near the push to ship something that's your full-time gig.

This is a special case of the general advice that keeping your expenses low allows you to spend your time on activities that don't have to (immediately) make you money. This is actually one of the main ideas in the Y Combinator system, isn't it (ramen profitability, work at home, etc)?

Yes, this is very similar to the advice Paul Graham gives when talking about "ramen profitability", because it takes time for people to create things of value - whether it's a startup or the next great Harry Potter story. In fact J.K. Rowling talked about her mad rush to just finish the first Potter book before returning to full time employment as a teacher, when there would be no time to write. It's interesting to me the people who tend to create the higher value things, artists in one form or another, are usually fairly poor. Not sure how many rich people create new things of value, or maybe it's just because there are disproportionately more poor people than wealthy people.

I'd narrow it down a bit—live in a cheap part of Brooklyn so you can actually meet your agent face to face because they almost invariably live in Manhattan. Even better, live in an artist warehouse in Bushwick so you have other people around to inspire you. Then again, it's all about what works for you.

Actually, this is good general advice! After my wife and I moved from living at the beach (exp$ensive) to the mountains (equally nice, and much cheaper), Carol was able to stop working except for a few fun jobs and charity work, and I can afford to turn down more consulting jobs and spend more time writing. We have several people in our social network here who write fiction (ouch, a tough business!) and I'll ask them tonight if it helps them live in a less expensive area.

Speaking of Patrick Rothfuss: he's an new author and his book Name of the Wind is amazing. If you enjoy fantasy and can get past the (overwrought and somewhat preening "Hah hah I am a Real Writer Now") first chapter, I highly, highly recommend it. It is my favorite book I've bought on my Kindle yet.

How does it compare to Martin's _Song of Ice and Fire_ novels? (my new yardstick for high-quality contemporary fantasy)

Imagine Martin writing Harry Potter about a manic depressive megalomaniac, then narrating it retrospectively.

Less political intrigue (by about two orders of magnitude), far fewer characters, frame character is better realized, far closer to Martin than Tolkien on the grit scale although less explicit about it, rather more magic, far closer to Tolkien than Martin in the heroic fantasy department.

I liked the first three Song of Ice and Fire books quite a bit, although in a lot of ways they are not my usual cup o' tea.

I submitted this after a discerning friend was raving about Name of the Wind, and pointed me at his site. It's next on my Kindle queue, I figure after 14 years obsessing, it has to be at least interesting!

The only comparable author I know is PC Hodgell, she seems to average 5-10 years between books. It's maddening since it's my favorite series, it's been 25 years since I started and there's still so many plot elements that are waiting to be resolved.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P._C._Hodgell

This can backfire. A good friend from high school went this route and he's still never published anything. He now has 15 years of no real job history. A bigger problem is that from an artistic viewpoint, his writing keeps getting worse. It's easy to just slide into solipsism when you're living so cheaply that you don't ever have to write anything other people would ever want to read.

This came up recently in a discussion on Charlie Stross' blog. He lives in a seemingly large city-center apartment in Edinburgh. Although Edinburgh is not London City or Manhattan, it's a pretty expensive place to live.

Part of his justification seems to be that for Sci-Fi, contemporary or near-future, living somewhere cheap can isolate you from an inspiring community. He also seems worried that living somewhere cheap can have a negative effect on your life in terms of health care and whatnot.

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/03/cmap-4-t...

I only heard about Pat Rothfuss a few days ago (via http://www.penny-arcade.com/2010/3/3/#1267646560 ) but I've really liked what little I've seen of his work so far. Got his book on hold at the library and will cheerfully shill out for the whole trilogy if I like it as much as I expect to.

"The Muffin of Wisdom" would be a great name for a comedic fantasy novel about a chef's hapless apprentice.

I'm curious how this might be applied to startups, as well as how it meshes with pg's advice to work in a startup "hub" like Silicon Valley, where the cost of living is anything but cheap. Is it really worthwhile to be subjected to the mind-numbing gold rush culture* at the expense of many months of "runway," simply because that's supposed to be motivating?

*OK, exaggeration guilty as charged, but you see my point.

Ah, the typical and noble starving artist, who sacrifices material well-being in order to focus on its artwork.

Yes. You seem to have a problem with that?

The sentiment is understandable. The myth of the starving artist suffering for his art was already (mostly) nonsense when it was dreamed up in the romantic era and it's high time, I think, that after two hundred years we start thinking about putting it to rest once and for all.

I'm not sure how much suffering was done, but as far as artists maintaining cheap living arrangements so they can focus on their art without having to earn much income, that's not exactly a myth. From French Impressionist painters living in garrets, to 80s punk rockers living in cheap lofts, it's a pretty common way of self-funding art production...

Yeah, but note I said it was a myth dreamed up in the romantic era, which would be around 1800 or so. People have been making art since way, way before that, and some of it is really quite good, despite the creators thinking of themselves primarily as craftsmen rather than as purveyors of a higher cause for which one should be suffering.

Next time you're at a nice restaurant (or Starbucks) ask your server what their real passion is. Not starving or suffering, but many people still do take low paying work while trying to start a career in writing/acting/etc.

That is quite literally how it works, although most emerging artists (who are serious about their career, and who have a real chance at regional or national prominence) would probably not describe what they're doing as "noble", more like "crazy", but in the understanding that that's also the only path that works for them.

The other option is to have rich parents. Sounds snarky, but it's true. In that case, you also get contacts and an understanding of the social class of most collectors.

(My wife got her MFA from UCLA and shows around LA.)

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