| I did a PhD in physics, then transitioned to a career as a quant in finance, and lately I’ve gotten involved in the arts with some side projects (music, writing). I’ve written the draft of a kids sci-fi novel and have a few other stories in the works, nothing published yet. First, I would suggest finding out what you want to do. You mention journalism and literature, which are quite different. Which one more appeals to you? As you may have seen, many techies here have GitHub side projects. So I’d recommend starting off by continuing with your tech day job and treating your writing as a kind of side project. If journalism is your calling, maybe you can start by writing a few free ‘articles’ on a blogging platform. If you want to do literature, then start by writing something. If you have a story in mind, get started on it. Maybe it’s a short story, maybe it’s a novel. But whatever it is : Start Today! Write just a single paragraph, even if it’s pure shit. And frankly the first paragraph of a first draft is likely to be shit so just let it be shit, it can be heavily edited or cut later. But you’ve written something, you’ve gotten started, and have planted a seed from which to build on! Also, Twitter has a brilliant supportive writers community. There are all kinds of things like hashtag games where you write a snippet based on the “word of the day”, each day there are dozens of different hashtags. See #vss365 as one of the most popular ones. Most authors I’ve seen and follow on Twitter have day jobs. Some have only quit their job after publishing a few successful novels. But the key is to write something and get something down and make progress on it. Start as a side project and see where it goes. And get yourself writing that first paragraph today!!! |