“Contrary to what many of you might imagine,” wrote Fran Lebowitz, “a career in letters is not without its drawbacks—chief among them the unpleasant fact that one is frequently called upon to actually sit down and write.”

But how you manage to do that—to make words appear in one form or another—is as varied as the various authors themselves. And understanding what Haruki Murakami taught us in Novelist as a Vocation…

Writing novels is, to my way of thinking, basically a very uncool enterprise. I see hardly anything chic or stylish about it. Novelists sit cloistered in their rooms, intently fiddling with words, batting around one possibility after another. They may scratch their heads an entire day to improve the quality of a single line by a tiny bit. No one applauds, or says “Well done,” or pats them on the back. Sitting there alone, they look over what they’ve accomplished and quietly nod to themselves. It may be that later, when the novel comes out, not a single reader will notice the improvement they made that day. That is what novel writing is really all about. It is time-consuming, tedious work.

…there’s really no expensive anything that will effectively glamorize the work of writing, so welcome to the cheapest business startup in America.

Here we are creeping up on the end of another year, and another reckoning in the form of taxes. This business—editing and writing—is what I do for a living as a full-time freelancer. That means I have to run my little business as a… well, a little business, not to put too fine a point on it. I’ve been running this little business for a decade and a half now and all that time the biggest struggle I’ve had when it comes to taxes is finding anything I can deduct.

I used to see writing by hand as an unnecessary affectation. Now I rip through cheap spiral notebooks (because I see no reason to buy expensive notebooks) like crazy. I bought a bunch of notebooks when they were on sale at the beginning of this school year at my local supermarket for 29¢ each. Here they are, stacked up in my closet…

This, and a pen you can pick up for less than a dollar—or even free here and there—is all you need to write the Great American Novel. In our November 2025 GoodReads group read, Writing Down the Bones, poet Natalie Goldberg said of notebooks:

This is your equipment, like hammer and nails to a carpenter. (Feel fortunate—for very little money you are in business!) Sometimes people buy expensive hardcover journals. They are bulky and heavy, and because they are fancy, you are compelled to write something good. Instead you should feel that you have permission to write the worst junk in the world and it would be okay. Give yourself a lot of space in which to explore writing. A cheap spiral notebook lets you feel that you can fill it quickly and afford another. Also, it is easy to carry. (I often buy notebook-size purses.)

You may be surprised how many authors are out there, pen and notebook in hand. Like, for instance, Stephen King:

I’ve still got a little bit of that scholar’s bump on my finger from doing all that longhand. But it made the rewriting process a lot more felicitous. It seemed to me that my first draft was more polished, just because it wasn’t possible to go so fast. You can only drive your hand along at a certain speed. It felt like the difference between, say, rolling along in a powered scooter and actually hiking the countryside.

And Lydia Davis:

The notebook is also where I write stories. Every story I write begins in the notebook and in fact is usually written entirely in the notebook. There is a good reason for that, though it took me a while to realize it: in the notebook nothing has to be permanent or good. Here I have complete freedom and so I am not afraid. You can’t write well—you can’t do anything well—if you feel cornered. I am not afraid because what I write in here doesn’t have to become a story, but if it wants to, it will.

You may well have a different process, and indeed I don’t write everything by hand. This blog post you’re reading right now is being typed into a Word document. Like Philip Roth…

I don’t ask writers about their work habits. I really don’t care. Joyce Carol Oates says somewhere that when writers ask each other what time they start working and when they finish and how much time they take for lunch, they’re actually trying to find out “Is he as crazy as I am?” I don’t need that question answered.

Hell, maybe you’re in with the retro typewriter crowd. Those tactile miracles worked for an awful lot of talented authors for an awful long time. Here’s how Allen Ginsberg described writing Howl:

I had a secondhand typewriter, some cheap scratch paper. I began typing, not with the idea of writing a formal poem, but stating my imaginative sympathies, whatever they were worth. As my loves were impractical and my thoughts relatively unworldly, I had nothing to gain, only the pleasure of enjoying on paper those sympathies most intimate to myself and most awkward in the great world of family, formal education, business and current literature.

Likewise, how much you spend on your writing is up to you, from way more than I’m sure I would ever recommend to effectively nothing at all. This is where your mileage may vary, or as Rick Rubin wrote in The Creative Act: A Way of Being:

When there are no material, time, and budget constraints, you have unlimited options. When you accept limitations, your range of choices is reduced. Whether imposed by design or by necessity, it’s helpful to see limitations as opportunities.

And for writing, there are so few limitations, it’s essentially all opportunities. This business—the business of writing, though not so much self-publishing—is so cheap to start and run it’s confounded my CPA this whole time. What can I write off to reduce my income? I don’t have any inventory because I have nothing physical to store, sell, or ship. I do not have separate office space because all I need is a desk and a computer (and okay, a few other things, but…). Having some kind of office that I can drive to and sit in, all by myself, just makes no sense. Still, “If you want a room to write in, just get a room,” Natalie Goldberg wrote. “Don’t make a big production out of it.” Though Murakami made it clear that, “Wherever a person is when he writes a novel, it’s a closed room, a portable study.”

And is writing done better at home anyway? In Essays, Wallace Shawn wrote:

To lie in bed and watch words bump together until they become sentences is a form of hedonism, whether the words and sentences glorify society and the status quo or denounce them. It’s very agreeable to live like that, even if people don’t like your work, criticize you, whatever.

In any case, I know I would be sitting in my rented office all by myself because I have no employees. I have no work for an employee to do. I’m writing this all by myself, and if you hire me to edit your book, I will do that all by myself, too. I don’t and will not ever employ any sort of AI agent, either. Anyone who knows me even a little will know that that goes without saying.

The ongoing costs of my business are few and not terribly expensive. I think my $30/month to PublishersMarketplace ($360 a year) is my biggest expense. I pay $2.99 a month for some extra iCloud space. And I think it’s somewhere around six dollars a year for the dictionary app I have on my phone. And $60 a year (plus high Washington state sales tax) for the entire Microsoft Office suite. And that’s more or less it in terms of ongoing expenses.

This year I did buy a few things. I needed a new printer (which 99% of the time is a scanner), and my tiny little desk finally drove me to the point of buying a bigger one.

This is good news for anyone thinking of writing—or already writing. You do not need investors, unless you don’t have the initial hit for a computer, I guess. Even then you won’t be going hat in hand to the likes of Peter Thiel.

And yes, you can even save the $60 or so a year on Word (sans the hated AI, which would bring that up to $100) by using some free things like Google Docs. This will work just fine until you actually finish the thing and want to start getting it in front of other professionals, so here’s where I’m going to challenge you to spend that money, at least.

Word, whether anyone anywhere likes it or not, is the professional tool. It doesn’t do everything perfectly, but it does everything necessary better than anything else. It really just does. And though you may be a Scrivner devotee you will eventually have to send your work to a professional of some kind—an editor, a designer/typesetter, etc.—and that’s where Scrivner ends.

It’s a never-ending source of confusion to me where authors I work with tell me they write their novel in Google Docs or even the Notes app on their iPhone because Word (at $60 a year) is too expensive. And this I discover after they’ve made the first of two payments of $1500 each for my services.

I’m not kidding. please tell me you see how weird that is.

Someone like me is actually by far your biggest expense, but someone like me who knows what they’re doing isn’t just running through your book and making a few notes and suggestions, moving a few commas around. What we’re doing is teaching you to write in a way that’s  precise, detailed, and completely focused on you and your work. And I only come in after you have finished writing the complete novel from beginning to end, and have brought it as far as you feel you can on your own. For some authors I’ve worked with that’s as much as ten years of spending almost nothing.

What I bring to the table is worth it—I honestly would not be doing this if I didn’t know that for sure. And consider the cost of 3¢ a word against the probably $70,000 for a creative writing MFA.

Look, I get why we don’t want to give any more money to any of the tech giants, so who wants Microsoft to get $60 a year richer? But instead, you’re going with Google? Because you think you’re actually getting anything for free from… Google?

You don’t have to pay me, but please at least cross Microsoft’s palm with silver so the rest of the world can work with you—after you’ve spent as long as you need to spending maybe a hundred bucks a year..

—Philip Athans

Join our group on GoodReads!

Fantasy Author’s Handbook is also on YouTube!

Did this post make you want to Buy Me A Coffee…

Send me a book from my Amazon Wishlist? 

Join me on Bluesky…

Get into other stuff at Substack…

Link up with me on LinkedIn…

Find me at PublishersMarketplace…

Check out my eBay store…

Or contact me for editing, coaching, ghostwriting, and more at Athans & Associates Creative Consulting or Reedsy?

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Absolutely not one word of this post was in any way generated by any version of an “AI” or Large Language Model, and no permission is granted for the use of any of the contents of this blog in the training of AI, LLM, or other generative systems.