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Leaving the Law for Writing: Where To Start?

By Jennifer Carsen

Republish: EasyPublish™ Published: 05Sep2009 Word count: 753 Viewed: 412 time(s) Get Free Content For Your Site

Law is like a bad marriage - easy to get into; hard to get out of. The primrose path starts in earnest in college, when you pore over the websites and request the glossy brochures. You might even talk to a couple of real-live law students - all of them hard-driving and full of enthusiasm. You long to join their ranks and learn about this mysterious process of "briefing cases." (How sweetly naive you were back in the day.)

Once you've gotten accepted somewhere, becoming a lawyer is merely a matter of following a time-tested recipe: Do your work for three years, get your degree, pass the bar, and presto! This is not to say that becoming a lawyer is easy - far from it - but it's a clear-cut path with a predictable end.

Becoming a writer, whether or not you were a lawyer first, is an entirely different story. There's no such thing as "writer school." Journalism school and/or an MFA don't really qualify - they're not a necessary prerequisite to anything, and many very successful writers would argue that pursuing either is a waste of time and money. Unlike lawyers, writers don't need accreditation. They need experience.

But where to start? Especially after the predictability of a legal career, pursuing anything writing-related seems like a confusingly endless mish-mosh of options. It's important to take your time and resist the impulse to get overwhelmed. Here are a few questions to ask yourself before making any major changes.

1. Are you committed to making a living at it? You may think a more reasonable first question would be, "What do you want to write?" You'll definitely need to ask yourself that, but not yet. This question has to come first, and here's why: Writing is a business. Becoming a professional writer is a very different thing than becoming someone who writes.

You may be firmly committed to becoming a professional writer, even if it means saving money for a long time, selling your house, and working at least as hard as you do now for far less money. Alternately, you may be interested in adding writing to your existing life without committing to a massive upheaval. Either is fine, but you need to be clear on both what you're after and the price you're willing to pay.

2. What do you want to write? Only after answering question #1 are you ready to turn to this one. Maybe you've always wanted to write novels. Maybe you don't care what you write, as long as you're able to pay your bills via writing. Now that you have the context provided by #1, you can start to get a sense of what your writing life will look like.

If you are committed to being a professional writer and, say, poems are what you want to write, you are going to need a very large cushion of savings to live off of - maybe indefinitely; even if you find a publisher, which is far from a given, most poets never earn enough to support themselves through their poems alone - or a willingness to take on other types of writing projects. If your goal is to make some additional money as you continue in your legal practice, you can do that quite nicely through business copywriting. In any event, start to sketch out both what your writing life will look like and how you will earn money.

3. Who can I talk to? After you've gotten some of the details worked out, it's important to talk to people who are successful at what you want to do - or what you think you want to do. You may not know any writers in your day-to-day life, but they're all over the place. It's just a little harder to ferret them out since a lot of them work alone in their homes. Chances are there's a organization for writers in your city (or state, if you live in a small state), and there are some great groups online. I recommend Freelance Success (http://www.freelancesuccess.com) - it's a very knowledgeable, supportive group. You'll have to pay a membership fee, but that's a good thing as it weeds out the looky-loos.

You may also want to consider professional coaching to help get you started on the right path, and help keep you motivated along the way. In any event, it's important to remember to focus on people who already have what you want and can help you get there, too.

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