Freelancing: Just Like In The Movies

Not a Tibetan sculpture. Just a desk accessory.

If you believe Hollywood, freelancing is the best career choice you could make – barring being a secret agent or lawyer, of course. Freelancers always have huge apartments, on the corners of beautifully-located skyscrapers in the middle of Manhattan (or some other, equally trendy place), with massive windows overlooking parks or a bay.

They work at hand-crafted desks made of glass and carbon fibre, upon which their $10,000 computer sits, with a gorgeous flat-screen monitor the size of Texas and the hand-crafted sculpture they picked up during their year of meditation in Tibet.

That is, of course, assuming they’re working at home. Sometimes, they need to get away from the bustle of city life, so they go to their holiday home – the one in Tuscany with a lake in the back garden, twelve acres of green hills to wander and a local grocery store where everybody loves their “visiting artist”.

They never worry about money or, if they’re a “starving artist”, they have to limit themselves to only having sushi delivered five times a week. If things are really bad, they may even have to sell one of their original Picasso paintings or write something “pulpy” for a magazine instead of a romantic best-seller.

Hollywood is, apparently, in another dimension.

The reality of freelancing is more likely a wobbly Ikea desk with a cheap, plastic keyboard and an old CRT monitor on it, next to several empty coffee cups and a pile of (as yet) unpaid bills.

It’s an apartment above a funeral service, with 1970s shag-pile carpets, horrible choices of paint for the walls and a damp patch in the bathroom that won’t go away no matter how many plumbers look at it.

It’s a tiny garden, probably shared with half a dozen other tenants or at least with neighbours who burn sausages on their cheap barbecue and get noisily drunk every weekend, then dump their beer cans into the overgrown patch of flowers you’ve been trying to cultivate for a bit of colour.

Its holidays in Skegness or Bognor, sitting in a deck chair as someone else’s noisy, drunk neighbours kick sand up, which the wind blows into your Mr Whippy ice cream. The local stores only sell cheap plastic sunglasses, “Wish You Were Here” postcards with pictures of the pier and “Kiss Me Quick” hats – and the owners don’t know you from Adam.

But it’s still a pretty good career choice. You get to set your own hours. There’s no boss breathing down your neck. The bills get paid (eventually). You get to write and create on your own terms.

So stick with it: you may never own a hand-crafted flat-screen monitor from Tibet, but you’ll never have to work in a cube farm again.