About writing and how it changed your life

Yes, I have a Wattpad account (I doubt most of the people here know about WP).

I am a published author. My schedule is about the same as it was before. Most authors don't make enough to quit their day jobs (yes, even bestsellers. You might want to Google Dayton Ward, who only recently gave up his day job, and he's a New York Times bestseller with a tie-in contract to Star Trek).

I write every single day, and I have written in some form or another (with substantial breaks) for over 45 years. I have been writing every day, consistently, since I want to say 2010. So it hasn't necessarily changed my life as I have been writing since I was 4 or 5 and I'm 52 now.

Living in my imagination? I'm not so sure what you're asking here. I live in a very real world where there are bills and bad weather and a home to clean and class assignments and whatnot. But when I write, I mainly listen to the characters. If they are well-developed, then I take dictation. If they aren't, then I work on whatever is missing from them. I also spend time on outlining, plotting, and scene setting, but I don't get it down to minutiae unless it's an important detail (e. g. this one is older, that character is taller, the year is 1941, whatever). This framework allows for a lot of creativity but with some limits that give a story structure and coherence.

I know a lot of people on Wattpad essentially write by the seat of their pants. It is a very phone-centric type of writing, and a lot of it is rather pedestrian. But it gets vote-stormed up because of the community and less as an indicator of quality or originality. There's a lot of good writing, too, but the big vote-getters aren't necessarily indicative of better or more compelling prose or poetry.

TPM, +I find Jes' answer much as I might have written as a lifetime journ; except I'm now 84 while he's still a spring chicken at 52