“I would not have taken that step unless I was sure that I could make it work. On the money I earnt, I gave myself five years to make it work.” Financially, it has. His novels, including Fightback, the most recent, have been successful, and he could have chosen to stick with writing alone. However, he found that the solitary life didn’t suit him after the buzz of headship. “I went from being at the centre of everything and making lots of decisions to a situation where my biggest decision was what time to have a coffee,” he says.
Steve now combines writing with a half-time position as a senior lecturer in creative writing at Bath Spa University, which gives him the contact with young people that, as a teacher, he loves, while still allowing him plenty of time to write. “I don’t think I would have got the teaching position (at the university) without being a published writer,” he adds. “Creative writing positions are very difficult to find.”
Having two jobs rather than relying entirely on writing makes financial as well as social sense. “I could never have made a living (just from) writing,” says Sue Palmer, a former head teacher and author of Toxic Childhood and 21st Century Boys. She combines it with working as a literacy consultant. “My writing gave me a profile in literacy and got my name known, so I made a living as a travelling speaker. It was the two things together that worked.” (But be aware that, as a self-employed person, you will be responsible for all your own business affairs as well as the practicalities of finding assignments, she adds).
Turn your hand to anything
It’s also important to be willing to turn your hand to anything, adds Suzanne Connell, a former Warwick junior school head and author of NAHT's "Writing a Policy". who is now a freelance writer based in Spain. “It’s about taking up opportunities wherever they emerge,” she says. Most of her work is for educational magazines and publishers, but she also does some supply teaching and writes for English-language newspapers in Spain. “I’ve even done some work for a law firm writing articles for local papers about VAT,” she says.
This is linked to the innate financial insecurity of being a freelance writer. “As a freelance, you could be dropped as quickly as you are given work, so I do feel vulnerable, but at the moment my career is financially viable,” she says.
Like Steve, Suzanne has found the change from headship to self-employment a strange one in some ways. “Being a head is such a full-on job that to go from that to getting up in the morning, sitting in front of a screen and thinking ‘right, how do I make myself do this work’ is quite a change. “You really do have to have self-discipline, particularly on days where the rest of your family has gone to the beach but you have a deadline.
“Another factor is that I am not very good at saying no – I take what I can find. It can be difficult as a freelance to balance your workload, because it’s not a steady stream. Sometimes I have to get up at 5am at the weekend because I have two or three things that have to be delivered at once.
“But one thing that I have said a few times is that if I had not tried writing, I would always have wondered how it would have gone.”
