* Do you have a family or others to support?
* Have you had any kind of success with your writing, even just an encouraging rejection?
* How long could you hold out without earning any money from writing?
* What's your position on eating cheap food?
If they answer those questions truthfully, they can pretty much figure it out themselves. However, sometimes I encounter someone who believes that if you do what you love, the money will follow.
I don't know if that's true, but I do know that sometimes it follows at a great distance. (Van Gogh, anyone?)
The idea that being passionate about your work will guarantee financial success is just wishful thinking. Sure, sometimes it's true but there are also a lot of people who pursue their passion and are good at what they do, but never have financial success with it.
This is a variation of "if you build it, they will come." In the movies, yes. In real life sometimes they come, sometimes they stay away, and sometimes they come to jeer and tear it down.
This doesn't mean you shouldn't take the risk. Years ago I quit my job and it took more than two years before I started having some success as a script writer. Two years isn't very long, but of course at the end of year one you don't know whether it will take another year or another ten or will never happen. I'd saved money and I lived in a studio apartment next to a hooker and I ate peanut butter sandwiches for lunch and dinner. Breakfast was corn flakes--actually, sometimes dinner was corn flakes, too. I was single so nobody else was forced onto the corn flakes and peanut butter diet because of my dream. That made a difference.
I like and admire people who take risks in the course of going for their dreams, and I admire them even more if they're doing it with their eyes open.
