This was the moment I knew I had to quit law to become a novelist

Why I gave up money, prestige, and power to embrace constant rejection

In March I left my trial lawyer job at an international law firm to work on my science fiction novel full-time.

I know these are the questions everyone wants answered: Why did I quit law? Why become a novelist? Why now? Those are hard questions to answer, and I’ve been wrestling with how to do it for months. 

I could write an entire novel based on myself, where the protagonist is an immigrant and the idea of her becoming a novelist is laughable. She grows up in a family and community where people who pursue art as a full-time career are viewed as too dumb to get “real” jobs. Where financial insecurity is the inescapable cloudy film through which everyone sees their life.

The protagonist’s glass shard (motivation) is a deeply-held belief that a person with a creative career is destined for a life cast in shame. A life where she lives paycheck to paycheck, and suffers the same indignities her parents suffered, which they bore so she could avoid that painful kind of existence. Where she spits on their sacrifice by choosing to be poor.

The first act of the story will culminate in her joining a prestigious law firm and achieving everything she was chasing her whole life: financial security, status, and personal power. The second act begins with her realizing that the cost to keep those things isn’t worth paying for the next 30 years.

Perhaps I’ll write that story someday. But not today. Today I give you a story of a smaller moment—the actual, final impetus for me leaving my prestigious, well-paid, coveted job in BigLaw.