Blog 92 - Financial Restraints

Blog 92 - Financial Restraints

November 2025

I’m going to start this blog post with a question that, if you are a fellow dreamer, hobbyist, or creative soul living in the real world, might sting a little.
Is there anything worse than trying to follow a dream but being absolutely, fundamentally constrained by financial boundaries?
I’ll wait… Got nothing? Me neither.
I ask this because I appear to be living the same nightmare over and over again. Every single day. I am a writer. I have been one for nearly a decade, which sounds impressively dedicated until you realize that I am a writer in the same way that a person who occasionally sings loudly in the shower is a professional vocalist—full of passion, zero official credentials.
My journey began innocently enough. Ten years ago, armed with an old computer formally owned by my mum, (that I still use to this day) and is held together mostly by hope and electrical tape, I decided I was going to write a Novel. The ambition was high, the skill set was... nonexistent. However, I began writing. I have been persistent. I have written, not well, and certainly not noticed, but I have put in the hours. I have filled journals, killed countless digital trees, and accumulated a collection of early manuscripts that, if I were ever tempted to dump them in a skip, would likely be flagged as toxic waste.
I think my skills have evolved since my first real attempts at serious writing. I feel like my dialogue sings now, where before it merely mumbled nervously. I hope my plot structures are tighter than the loose, baggy monstrosities I used to produce. But then again, what evidence have I got to substantiate that claim? At this point in time, my primary source of critique is my cat, who provides excellent feedback through judgmental stares and the occasional paw swat toward the Delete key. While he is consistent, he is not exactly industry standard.
Any professional knows that improvement requires exposure, feedback, and deliberate learning. And that, my friends, is where the wallet begins to weep. When you are deeply involved in a craft, you learn very quickly that the truly romantic aspects of the "Starving Artist" myth are lies. Writing might be cheap (all you need is a pen or a keyboard!), but becoming a professional writer is shockingly expensive.
My imagination runs wild with all the things I could do if the numbers in my bank account didn't actively fight against the numbers in my word count. Joining ‘free’ websites and forums is all well and good initially, but they only taunt you with the things you were trying to avoid. It is amazing the amount of offers that come through those websites for prestigious writing programs and even weekend writing retreats. I fantasize about spending three glorious days locked away in a cabin discussing narrative tension with a published author, but it’s only a dream at £500 for the course, £300 for the accommodation and £100 for the artisanal coffee that is mandatory for inspiration. I can’t even afford a £10 competition entry fee! The only retreat I get is watching free YouTube videos where a very earnest person explains the 'Save the Cat' outline structure, while simultaneously trying to fend off my aforementioned cat who is trying to sleep on the keyboard. It’s certainly an immersive learning experience, but perhaps not academically rigorous.
The cost of writing is a bottomless pit; one thing that separates the serious author from the hobbyist (who thinks that whether ‘he said’ should be placed after every line of dialogue, is the greatest grammatical mystery of all time), is professional editing. Developmental editing, line editing, copyediting—it’s an entire ecosystem of crucial, expensive expertise. I know, rationally, that my manuscript needs a comprehensive structural overhaul delivered by a stern professional who specializes in tough love. But when I look up rates, I see numbers like £0.03 per word. My current 90,000-word manuscript would require a down payment equivalent to a small used car.
So, in desperation, I use the free version of Grammarly and beg a highly overworked friend who works in HR to quickly glance at Chapter 1 when they have a spare moment (which is never). The result? A manuscript that is grammatically correct 65% of the time but structurally resembles a collapsing Jenga tower.
"Just self-publish!" I hear you cheerily suggest. "It’s so easy now!" Yes, the uploading is easy. The not looking like an absolute amateur part is where the cash constraints tighten their grip.
I kid you not, to self-publish effectively these days, you need:
• A professional cover designer (because no one buys a book that looks like it was designed in Microsoft Paint circa 2002).
• A formatting expert (because margins matter, apparently).
• A marketing budget (because books don't magically fly to the top of Amazon charts just because you believe in them very hard).
And that’s just for starters, I would love to do any number of the things that would forward my attempts at this wonderful, tortuous medium. But all of them require the one thing I am lacking: Cash. The glorious, enabling, impossible-to-hoard green stuff.
The irony of it is vicious, isn’t it? The best stories often come from struggle. The most poignant characters are born out of financial pressure and the tight squeeze of real life. My writing is fueled by the very circumstances preventing its professional ascension. The desire to write is free, but the ability to be read is a cash or card financial transaction.

I feel like I am operating perpetually in the red zone of my writing life. I have the ambition of a seasoned professional but the budget of a college sophomore whose primary food source is pot noodle and misplaced samples from Costco.
This isn’t just a complaint; it’s a commentary on the economic reality faced by anyone trying to break into a creative field without a safety net. Writing, like painting or music, requires both talent and investment—investment includes time, yes, that I can do, but crucially, investment in those external professional structures that validate and polish the raw talent…Not a chance.
Without the cash, you’re forced to stay running on the amateur treadmill, gaining speed but never quite crossing the finish line into visibility.
So, where does all that leave me? my ten years of dogged dedication, and my empty wallet? I’ll tell you; it leaves me writing. Because what choice do I have? I’ve written so much that stopping now would feel like voluntarily amputating a limb—a messy, unnecessary tragedy. I might not be able to afford the fancy critique group, or be able to hire a developmental editor, but I can spend another three hundred excruciating hours self-editing. I might not be able to market my books globally, but I can certainly flood my three loyal Twitter followers with enthusiastic updates.
The truth is, while financial freedom is the lubricant that makes the professional machine run smoothly, it is not the fuel. The fuel is the internal, desperate need to articulate the voices in your head. And that, thankfully, is still free.
To all my fellow struggling wordsmiths, the poets who can’t afford the chapbook printing, the novelists who wish they could hire an actual human to help them instead of relying on autocorrect, I say this: Keep going. We may be constrained by our bank balances, but we are not constrained by our ideas.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to write a proposal for a major literary grant that will fund my next novel and, critically, replace my mum’s computer’s electrical tape. Wish me luck on the next lottery draw. I’m going to need every penny.