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# What is a "Working Writer?"
- URL: https://www.joemilanjr.com/what-is-a-working-writer/
- Published: 2014-08-06T13:59:24.000Z
- Updated: 2024-01-28T04:45:45.000Z
- Author: Joe Milan, Jr.
- Tags: becoming a writer, Uncategorized, We're always amateurs, #wordpress, #Import 2024-01-25 18:25, #admin

Within the first few days of my first real Creative Writing course I said, without hesitation, my goal was to be a working writer. I wanted to make a living off telling stories. By the end of my degree, I felt that to become a “working writer” meant:

a.) “Sell out” and become one of those hated airport novelists/genre/copywriter/any non-literary, (aka not artistic) type of writer.

b.) Give talks, do a lecture circuit. Or Teach. (Make money from not writing.)

c.) Accept that you won’t make a living. (Get a day job. Probably teaching.)

Along those same lines I also heard, “There are only hundred people who make a living off writing fiction.” I don’t know if it’s true or not but I didn’t get the sense that it is correct.

And then I read what [Dean Wesley Smith](http://www.deanwesleysmith.com/killing-the-top-ten-sacred-cows-of-publishing-8-you-cant-make-a-living-with-your-fiction/?ref=joemilanjr.com) had to say about it.

How do I feel now?

Well, I’m not sure. I’ve known for a while that there are genre writers who make a living writing. Which would kind of fit with “a.)” But then again, does it even matter if it’s “genre fiction?” Because when you think about it, literary fiction is just a genre.

Just a thought that spinning in my mind at the moment.