by Kate St. Vincent Vogl

In my former life I was a corporate attorney, slaving on the 83rd floor of the Sears Tower for a century-old international firm. None of the kids in the Sunday school I taught back then believed what I did, and I’m not sure they’d believe what I do now, either. Somehow I’ve moved into another profession where no one dares admit being one, but not because of the bad jokes. It’s because as writers—as new writers especially—we worry no one will believe us, least of all ourselves.

This is true even for the successful ones. I saw children’s author Kate DiCamillo when she came through town a couple of years ago. “I make my living writing books,” she said. “I’ve just been able to start saying this, without qualifications, so let me say that again: I make my living writing books.” As if she couldn’t fathom it herself.

It’s not something many can claim. Most writers work at the edges—using a day job to support their writing addictions. Admit this, at least: it’s more than a writing habit. There’s a call that must be answered, and if you’ve heard it, then refer to yourself as a writer.

We hesitate to do that when taking only baby steps writing, but even as babies we are no less human. We are no less writers, either. Easy for me to say, but I didn’t call myself a writer until I got that first honorable mention in an international competition. Now I do what I can through writing, teaching, and editing. “You’re doing it,” a friend once told me. “You’re living the dream.”

He was dying of cancer. Somehow it made it all the better to have someone with that life view point out my blessings.

And being able to write definitely counts.

But it’s also a curse: a book won’t sell without promotion, and it’s hard to write when you’re working full-time on marketing. It’s for that reason that Shawn Lawrence Otto (the screenwriter for House of Sand and Fog) cautions that, between the marketing and the business end of writing, “you will always have a day job.”

I’ve learned firsthand that you have to do what you can to market your work. You begin to wonder where shameless self-promotion becomes smarmy, and whether there really is any such thing as bad press. You immediately decide the answer to that is no; then you wish you could tweak what you said, but that national news article is already out there. You realize anyone you meet could be a potential reader. You start talking with people in the security checkpoints at airports. They are, after all, about to enter that Internet-free flying time, a.k.a. reading time. (My husband will tell you that starting up conversations with strangers is not such a big stretch for me.)

You pray for an understanding family as you try to strike a balance between your writing and your kids. As award-winning writer Sun Yung Shin said at the Buffet for Beginning Writers, “There is no balance.” What your family put up with as you wrote is nothing compared to how it will be with promotions, since events tend to run in the evenings and on weekends. My daughter was miffed enough that my book was published before hers. Then I had the audacity to drag her along on the Midwest book tour for my memoir. (Apparently, at least according to my eighth grader, I am not as cool as I think I am, no matter how many newspaper or TV interviews I get.) So you find happy mediums: my daughter got to stay with her nana while I drove off to Pittsburgh. Nothing like being spoiled for a couple of days to make up for transgressions.

Sometimes, though, being there is exactly what your kids don’t want from you—like when I go to their school to talk to creative writing classes. When I see them in the hall, they hide behind their friends, embarrassed. So at least there I know I am fulfilling my role as parent.

The inimitable Mary Gardner has said that writers are pathologically well intentioned, and I suppose that’s just as true for how we find the right balance as it is for how we find the right voice.

Through it all, you just have to go ahead and throw what you’ve done into the universe to see what flies. You do because you have to. You are, after all, a writer. Live your dream.

Kate St. Vincent Vogl is the author of Lost & Found: A Memoir of Mothers. She teaches a variety of courses for children and adults at the Loft. She has an essay in Why We Ride: Women Writers on the Horses in Their Lives (Seal Press) and is currently writing a novel titled Days of May.