If you group these financial considerations together, what you find is an overarching theme of self-reliance. That is the quality that magazine writers need to make their jobs work from an economic standpoint. If you're the kind of person who can be smart about savings, not spend every penny in your bank account, and keep good track of your incoming and outgoing cash flow on a monthly basis, then you should have little trouble with the financial realities of being a full-time freelance magazine writer.

On the other hand, if you live hand-to-mouth and tend to spend every penny you are given, you are likely to run into trouble — because the pennies won't all come in the same amounts every week, and you may fall well short at tax time or when a large, unexpected medical bill comes your way.

These are some of the practical realities of being a magazine writer, and they are considerations just as real as your abilities to report and write. You can sell 300 articles a year, make all your deadlines, and keep your editors coming back for more, but if you can't manage the money that you earn along the way — if you can't ensure your own health care and retirement savings — then you will end up learning the hard way that magazine writing simply is not the best career choice for you.

This has nothing to do with your ability to put nouns and verbs in the right order. It's simply the way the world works, and you need to think hard about whether you have what it takes to survive.

You also need to put serious thought into whether you will be happy with the professional realities of being a magazine writer. They are a world apart from the professional realities that go along with working as a full-time staff member at a magazine, and in fact are far different from the professional realities that come with almost every other full-time job out there.