How to be a writer with a day job
Maybe I should have been more miserable?
Welcome to the 180th issue of Subtle Maneuvers. This week, I’m sharing a personal essay, looking at my own early confusion about how to fund a life as a writer and some other models I might have considered. If you have a day job and you’ve realized that the best time to work on your art is in the morning (me too!), pre-order my new book by March 31st and I'll give you a three-month subscription to my “Worm Zoom” accountability group, filled with other writers and artists who are also carving out the time to keep going. —Mason
If you want to be a writer and you don’t have any money, or not much, what should you do?
It’s a dilemma faced by countless young people, and many not-so-young, and there is no easy answer, though plenty of people will tell you otherwise. When I was twenty-one, near the end of my time in college, a professor told me what to do “if you’re serious about being a writer.” I was serious. In that case, he said, you should move someplace cheap, get an undemanding day job, and write in the evenings after work and on the weekends. He told me this as if he were inducting me into a great secret hiding in plain sight: Here is the way, though few are dedicated or disciplined enough to follow it. I was flattered that he considered me dedicated or disciplined enough to hear the truth. And, to be honest, I liked the sound of it. To all outside appearances, just another working stiff. But, really: a budding literary genius? Writing in his free time—no one would even know—gradually accumulating page upon page, until . . .
Besides, I didn’t have any better ideas. As college graduation neared, I hadn’t applied to grad school or figured out a way to move to an exciting city or identified a well-defined career path to embark upon. I had an English degree and I wanted to be a writer and there was enough open floor space beneath a dormer window in my dad’s house in Nashville, Tennessee, to accommodate a twin-size futon. That was the starting point.
Pretty soon, however, I had secured the undemanding day job—at a university medical library—and an affordable apartment, too, less than a mile away. The proximity was important: I couldn’t afford a car. I used my graduation money to rent the apartment; otherwise I had no savings and some debt, about fifteen grand in student loans and a little under a grand on credit cards, on which I was making the minimum monthly payments. Once I had gotten the hang of the library job, and the high-three-figure paychecks were direct-depositing into my checking account every other Friday—this was 2002; my starting salary was $26,000—I was ready to begin phase two: writing a best-selling novel.
The absurdity of this plan did not really occur to me, or at least I couldn’t see how my plan was any more or less absurd than any other writer’s. I thought this was how it was done, more or less. Certainly that’s what my professor had led me to believe. He had told me that the definition of a writer is someone who writes every day—that’s it. When he met someone who claimed to be a writer, he said, he always asked them: How many words did you write today? If they said, well, none, or otherwise dodged the question, he swiftly concluded that they weren’t a real writer, and sometimes even told them as much. He told me all this with relish, and I accepted it all, practically imbibed it.
So it was extremely painful to find myself living someplace cheap, working an undemanding day job, and, day after day, writing precisely zero words. Very occasionally, I would break the dry spell and write three or four or even five hundred words, and even more occasionally I might manage to keep up this streak for a few days in a row, but on re-reading these drafts I would inevitably find them terrible and decide to start over. Each time, starting over got a little harder, and a little more time passed between attempts, and then a lot more, and pretty soon I wasn’t writing at all.
Money had nothing to do with my difficulties and it had everything to do with them; it was bound up in the very fabric of what I was trying to do. I couldn’t decide if I should try to write the kind of thing that I most liked to read—primarily: long, introspective, semi-autobiographical novels about sensitive-artist types—or if I should try to write the kind of thing that would sell. I thought it would make sense to write the kind of thing that would sell first, to make enough money to write full-time, and then, after that, focus on my semi-autobiographical sensitive-artist fiction, which I had no expectation of making money from. How did I arrive at such a strange, complicated, and overwrought attitude about writing? Looking back, I can see why I wasn’t able to write anything, or not much, and why what little I did manage to write felt insincere, put-on, fake.
So if you want to be a writer—or another species of creative artist—and you don’t have any money, what should you do?
This is the question that animates my new book, and—spoiler alert—there is no one-size-fits-all answer. But I sincerely believe that by showing how some brilliant minds through history confronted the question—how they thought about it, what choices they made, and how those choices influenced the art they made and their larger careers—we can be better resourced to navigate this dilemma in our own lives.
In other words: This is the book I wish I could have read when I was twenty-one and had no idea how to go about becoming a writer while also paying for my life. So many of us, in whatever creative field—we are figuring it all out from scratch. Figuring out how to build up a working method, how to put our work out there, how to keep going when we feel discouraged, and, crucially, how to pay for all the time, trial and error, and experimentation it takes to do this work.
If you’re struggling to write or make art while working a day job, and wondering how anyone ever managed to do both things, and what other options there might be, and whether the proper attitude toward this dilemma is grim determination, buoyant optimism, or something else—I’ve distilled years of research into a book that will make you feel less weird and alone in this struggle.
Making Art and Making a Living comes out March 31st, and you can pre-order it now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop, Powell’s, or your local bookstore.
So I wasn’t writing in my library days. But I was thinking about writing all the time, and beating myself up for not writing, and wondering how I could start. And I was hungry for any stories I could find about how other writers did it—or artists, or musicians, or anyone in a similar position—because, clearly, I was missing something, and I wanted to figure out what it was and how to rectify it, and fast.
The closest model I could find at the time was the English poet Philip Larkin, who spent his entire adult life working as a librarian and wrote poetry in the evenings after work. I liked Larkin; I had a blue-green paperback edition of his Collected Poems and, in the spring, I sometimes chanted his poem “The Trees” to myself while walking to and from the library. After the measured, somber observations of the first eleven lines, the poem’s final line struck me as almost miraculous, as if the trees themselves were speaking through this doleful middle-aged bachelor-librarian: Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.
Larkin grew up the bookish son of a city treasurer in Coventry and was a scholarship student at Oxford, graduating in 1943. There he formed an intense friendship with his fellow student Kingsley Amis, who would go on to become one of Britain’s most important postwar novelists. Larkin wanted to write as well—both novels and poetry, though initially he was more focused on fiction—but first there was the problem of his career. “I never had the least desire to ‘be’ anything when I was at school,” he told the Paris Review decades later, “and by the time I went to Oxford the war was on and there wasn’t anything to ‘be’ except a serviceman or a teacher or a civil servant.” Larkin was judged unfit for military service because of his poor eyesight, and he judged himself unfit for teaching because of the stammer he’d suffered from since childhood. The civil service turned him down, twice. As it was wartime, Larkin had to find some sort of gainful employment or else face compulsory labor; as he told the Paris Review, “in those days the government had powers to send you into the mines or onto the land or into industry,” fates he certainly wanted to avoid. The Birmingham Post listed a vacancy for a librarian in a small town in Shropshire. Larkin applied.
He got the job, and later worked at two university libraries before settling, in 1955, at the University of Hull, where he would be head librarian until his death thirty years later, at age sixty-three. By that time he would be not only one of England’s most beloved poets but an enterprising library administrator as well. When he arrived at Hull, there were eleven staff members to supervise and about 125,000 books. By the end of his career, Larkin had grown the collection to 750,000 books in two new buildings whose construction he oversaw and he was managing a staff of more than a hundred. The university’s vice chancellor later told one of Larkin’s biographers: “I think people who have written about him have made too much of his poems and not enough of him as a librarian.”
As for writing those poems—in interviews, Larkin made the arrangement sound easy enough: Work all day, come home, write for an hour or two after dinner and the dishes. It bothered me that I couldn’t manage to do the same thing. I couldn’t even read after work, or could only read something light, like a magazine—certainly not novels or poetry or more demanding nonfiction. And if I didn’t have enough concentration energy to read a novel, how on earth could I expect to write one?
Many years later, I was comforted to read the great science-fiction author Octavia Butler say that after her own day-job shifts she was “too full of other people” to do any writing. This was in a 1997 interview. “I found that I couldn’t work very well after spending a lot of time with other people,” Butler said. “I had to have some sleep between the time that I spent with other people and the time that I did the writing, so I would get up early in the morning.”
Yes! I was the same as Butler. After work I always felt “too full of other people,” too, and the only time I have ever been able to write anything of worth has been early in the morning, right after waking. Maybe if twenty-one-year-old me had read about how early Butler would get up to write—as early as 2:00 a.m.—it would have inspired me to be more ruthless about securing my own early-morning writing time. Ruthless is one of the things I was not at that age. I hadn’t grasped yet just how much sacrifice writing would require.
Butler sacrificed by enduring a series of “horrible little jobs”—as a dishwasher, a telemarketer, a warehouse worker, even a potato-chip inspector. And because she got up so early to write, she’d be “sleepy and grumpy all day” at these jobs, which no doubt made them even more horrible. By contrast, I arrived at the library well-rested, punctual, carefully attired, eager to please.
Were there other options I hadn’t considered—for instance, writing on the job?
This was the Argentinian poet, essayist, and short-story writer Jorge Luis Borges’s solution, during his years working as an assistant in Buenos Aires’s municipal library system, starting in 1937.
“At the library,” Borges discovered, “we did very little work. There were some fifty of us doing what fifteen could easily have done.” As a result: “I would do all my library work in the first hour and then steal away to the basement and pass the other five hours in reading or writing.”
Though this sounds like a dream job for a writer, Borges was miserable. He stayed at the library for nine years and they were, he wrote, “nine years of solid unhappiness.” He recalled:
At work, the other men were interested in nothing but horse racing, soccer matches, and smutty stories. . . . Ironically, at the time, I was a fairly well-known writer—except at the library. I remember a fellow-employee’s once noting in an encyclopedia the name of a certain Jorge Luis Borges—a fact that set him wondering at the coincidence of our identical names and birth dates. Now and then during these years, we municipal workers were rewarded with gifts of a two-pound package of maté to take home. Sometimes in the evening, as I walked the ten blocks to the tramline, my eyes would be filled with tears. These small gifts from above always underlined my menial and dismal existence.
I can relate, sort of. At Thanksgiving, university medical-center employees (the library was part of the medical center) were rewarded with frozen turkeys to take home. But I was a vegetarian at the time and instead collected a free Tofurky, a frozen wheat-and-tofu globe in a cardboard box, which I carried the mile home. My eyes weren’t filled with tears, however—I was delighted.
Maybe I should have been more miserable. Borges’s nine years of solid unhappiness soon became some of his most fertile as a writer. After a freak accident on Christmas Eve of 1938 (Borges hit his head on a freshly painted open casement window, contracted septicemia—blood poisoning—and spent a month in the hospital hovering between life and death), he produced a pair of stories—titled “Pierre Menard, Author of ‘Don Quixote,’” and “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”—that were the beginning of a new kind of writing not just for him but for anyone, really. Some of Borges’s new stories were, he wrote, “notes upon imaginary books.” Others were like puzzles, but also like detective stories, but also philosophical meditations, but rooted in realism, too, though they had fantastic elements. They could produce a vertiginous feeling in the reader—what Borges called sagrado horror. He continued writing in this vein for the next several years, during his still-plentiful free hours at work. “I kept up my writing at the library,” Borges recalled. “Though my colleagues thought of me as a traitor for not sharing their boisterous fun, I went on with work of my own in the basement, or, when the weather was warm, up on the flat roof.”
If I had known these details about Borges’s library employment at the time of my own, I’m sure I would have found them maddening. My library occupied a newly constructed building that resembled a gigantic fishbowl, with a curving four-story glass curtain wall that left no one, not even the books, a place to hide. There was no chance of writing on the job, though on evening shifts I could sometimes get away with reading a novel at the entrance desk. Besides, whose workday was only six hours long? Mine was nine hours, if you included the mandatory one-hour lunch break that felt impossible to use in a satisfying way.
Why not write on those lunch breaks? Truthfully, it never even occurred to me, and if someone had suggested it, I’m sure I would have come up with plentiful excuses—not enough time, no place to sit in uninterrupted privacy, too hungry, “too full of other people.” But it would have been possible. Certainly it’s been done, most famously by the poet Frank O’Hara, one of the great day job–holders in literary history . . .
. . . and one of the forty-something figures whose art-and-money arrangements I delve into in my new book, which you can pre-order now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop, Powell’s, or your local bookstore.
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And thank you for reading about my early struggles as a writer and junior library employee! I’m curious: Do you agree with my professor’s advice? What do you think I should have done differently? I’m also considering writing a part two to this post; if you’d like to read about what happened next, or if you have some better advice for twenty-one-year-old me, please let me know in the comments.
If I were advising a 22-year-old who didn't come from family wealth and who wanted to pursue a writing career, I would tell them to find a job where they can make the most amount of money per hour and have the greatest flexibility in their schedule. There's no prestige in working in restaurants (and you'll scare your parents) but it's great if you want your days clear for writing.
I'd really like to know the rest of your own story :)