Well, it’s been a month since my ten days of blogging. Am I rested? Well not really, because I’ve spent the time catching up with all sorts of writing and day job related issues. Which more or less brings me to this post.
Day jobs are a necessary evil for most writers. There are a lucky few who make enough money from writing alone to fund their lives. For the rest of us, there’s always likely to be a balance involved. This week I noticed a couple of posts which presented two very different perspectives on the writer’s day job. First off at full-stop.net Catie Diabato wrote in praise of the 9 to 5. She celebrated
the ability to support oneself during the creation of the work, beholden to no other entity. I know how to write a book while also having a job. I will never need to rely on grants, a university’s funding, a fellowship, or a retreat to fund my writing time. If I lose my job, I’ll find another, and it almost doesn’t matter what it is (not easy, in this market, but doable, because I have a good job history and skill set, and I’m still young enough to seem like a good investment). I’m making the money myself, and I’m in charge of to whom it gets allocated. It’s me. I’m the one who gets it. And every penny coming in will keep going right to me, when I start the second book, and when I finish it.
Then Go Into The Story replayed an ancient post from 2008 which linked to an equally ancient edition of Cary Tennis’s advice column at salon.com. The mood here was very different.
In spite of what you believe is possible — that it is possible to “have your day job and keep your integrity” — my experience has been that the concrete, day-to-day forces, sociological and economic, that hold corporations together and make them function, will and must work on you; they will force you to choose. You cannot maintain two completely separate lives. What you are experiencing now, it seems to me, is the pain — the terror, perhaps — of realizing that your occupation must take all of you.
And what do I think? I think that most of us don’t have any choice but to earn money. Especially if we happen to have a mortgage, or horror upon horrors, children. There is, of course, Cyril Connolly‘s famous pram (“there is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall”). But, hell, I’m not going to be taking the little tykes back to the stork. Anyway, there’s a return-by limitation, I think.
But there is a point to be made about the serious job. The job that wants your concentration, or your evenings, or your creativity. Some occupations want your soul, there’s no getting round it. Perhaps writers should avoid work they enjoy and are good at. But that seems pretty counter-productive.
After a fantastic year doing a Creative Writing MA at UEA I’m about to spend more of my time writing code, and writing about writing code — both of which I love doing. I’m pretty good at them too. The trick is going to be in finding a balance between these new challenges and writing fiction. But that’s the kind of negotiation that most of us have to make here in the real world. I have to believe that, with discipline and some early mornings, I’ll make it work.
In practical terms, this all means that Inflatable Ink now has a sister blog which is part of my my professional site: getInstance(). If you’re at all interested in software development and design patterns (hey, you never know) it may be worth checking out.
At the same time, far from winding things down here, I’ll be taking Inflatable Ink weekly. As in the old days, Friday will be my regular deadline (well, as in the old days, let’s say Friday flopping pathetically over into Saturday). I’ll also be folding my blog, bookshape, which tracks links on the future of the book, into this one.
And now, as Kent Beck writes in the introductions to his books on Xtreme Programming, “Excuse me. I gotta go program.” (I always say that in a kind of Superman voice, in case you’re interested).
