Nathan Bran­ford is a lit­er­ary agent with Cur­tis Brown, Ltd. in New York and one of the most inter­est­ing blog­gers out there about writ­ing and pub­lish­ing. Some­times he does a “You tell me” fea­ture where he asks his read­ers to com­ment their answers to a ques­tion about the writ­ing life.

The Wrestler” got me think­ing about the sac­ri­fices writ­ers make. While it’s cer­tainly pos­si­ble (and advis­able) to live a bal­anced life as a writer that does not involve Randy “The Ram”-esque self-​destruction, every­one I know who has suc­ceeded as a writer had to give up some­thing to get there, whether it was time doing some­thing more imme­di­ately fun, spend­ing time with friends and fam­ily, or the abil­ity to read bad writ­ing with­out cring­ing. What have you given up for your writ­ing dream?

Nathan Brans­ford — Lit­er­ary Agent: You Tell Me: What Have You Given Up for Your Writ­ing Dream?

This comes at a really inter­est­ing time for me. I’m reread­ing my jour­nals from 2000 in the process of con­vert­ing them from Word to Ever­note, and I’m shocked at how much my life has changed this decade. So what have I given up to be a writer?

  • A wife (I really never date)
  • Kids (see above)
  • A house/​mortgage (really doesn’t seem wise given the feast or famine nature of publishing)
  • Bet­ter pay­ing but more time con­sum­ing jobs in IT (I work on a helpdesk, but I could have been a CIO of a smaller com­pany years ago)
  • Con­sis­tent suc­cess as a blog­ger (I can’t seem to make time to blog and write fic­tion at the same time, so when you see me post­ing here, you can safely bet that I’m stalled on a fic­tion project)
  • A pretty fair bit of sanity

How about you?