One of my editors said to me recently, "I tried to support myself with my writing once. The whole endeavor lasted for about a day and a half and scared me to death."

I am one of the privileged ones. I do support myself with my writing. I no longer even supplement my income by teaching on the side, something I did for forty years. Nor do I supplement my income by speaking in schools as many children's writers do. More than a decade ago I ran out of the energy required to hold the attention of gymnasiums full of wiggly kids or ostentatiously bored teens. So my income comes almost exclusively from the words I assemble each day, and yes, sometimes the uncertainty that oozes from every segment of this changing world of publishing scares me, if not quite to death, pretty thoroughly.

But I'm less interested in looking at that uncertainty—it is what it is, and much of it is beyond my control—than I am in examining the ways supporting myself with my writing impacts the writing itself.

First, let me say that I know that I am privileged to earn my income doing work I love so deeply. I never lose sight of that fact, even on the days when I face another rejection or a too-close deadline or a project I've committed to that stretches my "love" a bit thin. Not enough people are able to use their talents so fully in whatever it is they do to make a living, and I never forget that.

But the truth is that writing for publication changes the act of writing itself. It becomes less an expression of soul and more a product. The soul's need to speak remains part of the process. If it doesn't, one becomes a hack, the work no more than mechanically competent. But even with the soul engaged, when you are writing to earn a living everything about the process becomes work.

My father was a brilliant man, who, in the face of the Depression of the 1930's, settled on and subsequently stayed with a job greatly beneath his capacities and his education. "When the next Depression comes," he used to say, "I won't be one of the ones laid off. I'll have seniority." He also used to say, "The reason they call it work is because you don't like doing it. If you liked doing it, no one would pay you." I have spent my entire adult life proving him wrong. I like the work I do. I even love it. If I knew I would never earn another cent writing, I would still get up every morning and sit down to play with characters and ideas and words.

But . . . here comes my confession. Sometimes I envy those who write just because they love to write, without any thought of having to sell what they produce or meet a deadline or satisfy any eye but their own. Earning your living this way does change the process. What was once a guilty hobby, a thrilling exploration that I slipped into in every possible crack of time now comes guilt free. But it is also comes with few thrills attached.

Writing is the only one of the arts that, if you confess to doing it, people will nearly always ask whether you're a professional. "What have you published?" they'll say as though publication were the only reason to write. If you were to say, "I play the piano," the same folks would be unlikely to ask when were you last on a concert stage. And I have always encouraged my students to write because they love to write, without using publication as a yardstick to measure the worth of their work. And I mean that sincerely.

So for the just-for-the-love-of-it writers out there, I say, rejoice in the process. Share what you accomplish every way you can. And if you get a chance to publish? Go for it. But even publication doesn't have to change the fun of a free-flowing process . . . that is, it doesn't have to change it if you don't quit your day job.