Advice for new writers: Live somewhere cheap

I moved into my mom's basement.<p>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.<p>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.<p>I call myself a full-time writer now, since I'm writing about 5-9 hours a day.<p>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.)<p>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).<p>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.<p>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.<p>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 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)?

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.

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.<p>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.<p><a href="http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/03/cmap-4-territories-translation.html#more" rel="nofollow">http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/03/cmap-4-t...</a>

I only heard about Pat Rothfuss a few days ago (via <a href="http://www.penny-arcade.com/2010/3/3/#1267646560" rel="nofollow">http://www.penny-arcade.com/2010/3/3/#1267646560</a> ) 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.<p>"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?<p>*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.