You’ll Know When You Turn from Amateur to Professional Writer

When you’re able to stare resistance in the face each morning and sit down to write anyway.

Somerset Maugham was asked if he wrote on a schedule or only when inspiration struck. He answered, “I write only when inspiration strikes,” he replied. “Fortunately, it strikes every morning at 9:00 o’clock sharp.”

That’s a pro.

“Maugham reckoned another, deeper truth: that by performing the mundane physical act of sitting down and starting to work, he set in motion a mysterious but infallible sequence of events that would produce inspiration, as surely as if the goddess had synchronized her watch with his.” — Steven Pressfield

While the professional may write for love, the amateur writes for fun and waits for “inspiration” to strike. The professional writes for money while trying to keep it fun but writes every day whether inspiration strikes or not.

The number one sabotage a new writer faces is resistance

I love to write. I have since I could spell my first word and hold my first pencil. But I didn’t start to make money from writing until I treated writing as the professional does, seriously and like a job. A job I have to show up for or I’ll be fired. Since being paid for my words, I have found many differences between the paid writer (the professional) and the amateur (not paid).

What qualities define a professional?

The professional:

Plays full-time.
Show up every day.
Writes seven days a week.
Shows up no matter what, in sickness and in health, one way or another come what may.
Treats writing like a vocation.
The professional mind may wander, but he stays at the writing desk and resists distractions. He doesn’t get up until his work for the day is done.
She loves writing so much she devotes her life to it. The professional is committed to his work for the long haul.
Works for money, and the stakes are high and real. Works to be paid to put her kids through school, invest in the future, for money to spend on higher education, and to pay the bills. To clarify, the professional works for money, but does it out of love, as well. The professional loves it, or he wouldn’t devote his life to it of his freewill.
Pros don’t overidentify with their work. The professional’s best work or worst doesn’t define him. Pros put their work there, release it. Once it’s released, it is no longer theirs. It is the audiences now, and they define and interpret for themselves. The pro isn’t invested in its success or terrified of its failure. He knows his work is done. It’s not his anymore to evaluate or his place to correct or assess the public’s response.
She wants to master her technique.
He has a sense of humor about his work.
The professional isn’t overly concerned with praise or blame. It goes down the same drain. The pro knows judgment is part of the job.

The amateur:

Plays part-time.
Show up when she feels like it, not every day.
Takes days off.
Is a weekend writer.
Treats writing like a hobby.
When her mind wanders, she uses it as an excuse to stop working. Doesn’t stay at the writing desk until the task at hand is complete
The amateur is easily distracted, lets resistance in its many forms, stop her from sitting at the desk and doing the work.
Doesn’t love it enough.
Isn’t committed to the work for the long haul.
The stakes are not high but illusionary and fake. He doesn’t make money.
The amateur doesn’t have a sense of humor about his failures.
Overidentifies with his art. Is overly invested in its success and failures.
The amateur doesn’t or hasn’t mastered his technique at all and doesn’t care to.
He doesn’t expose himself to judgment in the real world. He lets fear (resistance) stop him from publicly sharing; he thinks sharing his work with a friend will get him impartial critical feedback. Author of The War of Art, Steven Pressfield, says, “Nothing is as empowering as real-world validation, even if it’s a failure.”
You don’t hear the amateur complaining, “This f^*king book is killing me!” Instead, he doesn’t write his book at all.

To clarify on writing for money

From Steven Pressfield’s book The War on Art,

The payoff of playing-the-game-for-money is not the money (which you may never see anyway, even after you turn pro). The payoff is that playing the game for money produces the proper professional attitude. It inculcates the lunch-pail mentality, the hard-core, heard-head, hard-hat state of mind that shows up for work despite rain or snow or dark of night and slugs it out day after day.

This is why I will often suggest to focus only on writing and publishing for 30–90 days straight because the most important thing when starting is cementing the habit first. The habit of writing. The grind, the hard-core, lunch-pail mindset you need to bring to writing every day and forming the habit.

Repetition forms the habits, gets the routine down. The routine establishes the writer’s triggers, what works, what doens’t, taking the guesswork out of your environment, increasing the chances of sitting in the chair to get to the work of writing. Routine is key to this, and why all professional writers have one.

If you want to be a professional writer and make an income — and this is very possible with platforms like this one (even if you’ve never made a cent from writing), having a goal and stating what the goal is, is necessary. But what drives success is setting up a system to support the goal — the habit of writing.

Your system is everything that that entails. Your system is how often you write, where you write, what time of day you write, how often you submit to publications, whether you take a class to get better at writing, when you edit and how you break down an article to make it clear and concise for your readers.

It isn’t the writing that is hard. It is the sitting down to write and staying until your writing session is complete, with minimal distractions. Your system helps with this.

More on not taking things personally

Learning to not take things personally is both a practice and a gift. Whether it’s a negative comment from a reader you don’t know or an insensitive remark from your mother-in-law about the quiche you slaved over for your lunch date with her.

When people criticize, they are dealing with their own resistance, fear, self, lack of confidence, etc. Don’t take things personally in your work as well, whether those comments are positive or negative.

When people comment that an artist must have a thick skin, Pressfield explains why the artist most have a thick skin in more detail,

“he has seared his professional consciousness in a place other than his personal ego. It takes tremendous strength of character to do this because our deepest instincts run counter to it. Evolution has programmed us to feel rejection in our guts. Resistance knows this and uses it against us. It uses fear of rejection to paralyze us and prevent us, if not from doing our work, then from exposing it to public evaluation.”

The professional does not take rejection personally because it stops him from doing his work.

In conclusion

The main difference between the professional and the amateur is the amateur plays for fun, and the professional loves it so much he commits full-time, in every way mentioned above.

The professional stares resistance in the face — fear, sabotage, procrastination, lack of confidence, the mounting daily chores — she stares them down every day before she sits down to write.

She stares them down, and she writes anyway.

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