I’ve seen this topic come up a few times in various writing-related message boards: what is the ideal day job for an aspiring writer or a writer who isn’t up to subsistence levels of writing income yet? I’m sure that there’s no absolutely ideal such job, since everybody’s different and yada yada yada, but here’s what I’ve discovered.
:: Any job that involves long periods in front of a computer screen is lousy for a writer, because it’s really hard to spend seven or eight hours at a desk and then come home, sit down at a different desk, and keep right on doing computer stuff. My last job was in telesales, and the first few months there killed my writing output. Luckily, the solution there was obvious, for me: I wrote longhand at home, because the atmosphere was totally different. Plus, working longhand is the only way to be “portable” for a writer who doesn’t have a laptop, and I really enjoyed packing it all up in my canvas Land’s End book bag and taking it to Borders or wherever. The big downside there was that writing longhand is slower than typing, but I often found that all to the good, since I can often type faster than I can think. (The results thereof tend to show up here, of all places!)
:: A non-computer job, then, is good. But another consideration isn’t just the “in front of a computer for hours” syndrome. There’s the little matter of mental energy. A job that doesn’t involve a whole lot of deep thought is good for writing, because then one can do a lot of “mental story processing” while working at something else. I’m finding myself doing this a lot at the store: let’s be honest, wandering around with a broom and dust butler isn’t the most mentally stimulating of tasks, but I get to do a lot of thinking about the current story or chapter in the novel, which is great. If you wish to be a writer, an essential skill to cultivate is the ability to think in a “writerly” way even when not actually sitting down just a-stringin’ words along. In the current job, I have been finding myself thinking about my characters and what they’re doing, even as I’m attending to the demands of the job at hand. I couldn’t do this in telesales, because you just can’t mull over an upcoming conversation between two characters while you’re trying to con entice the pharmacist on the other end of the line to buy twice as much Phenytoin Oral Suspension as he says he needs.
Ah, but! You don’t want too much consumption of mental resources on the job, else you won’t be able to think about writing; but it can go the other way, as well. A job that requires one to do the same repetitive task, over and over and over again, for hours without change in tasks, is just as mentally draining and consumptive of resources as the sales job. This I discovered when working in the university library years ago; back then it usually fell to me to sort together the shipments of new cards for the card catalog, which came in thousands at a time. The effect of this was numbing. So, too, was the time in the telesales job when they had me do nothing but conduct “customer service” surveys, in which I made calls with no sales component. Again, the repetition killed my ability to divert mental energy to thinking about writing at the same time I was simply reading the same questions over and over again. So here you need a job that moves you from one duty to the next.
:: Restaurant management, I always found, had moments when I could think about writing and moments when I couldn’t, and the higher on the management chain of command I ascended, the fewer the “writing-able” moments were. The implication here is pretty obvious: avoid too much responsibility, because it kills the ability to think about story.
:: I’ve never held any kind of editorial position, so I’m not prepared to advance any claims as to how spending hours upon hours reading dreadful story after dreadful story from the slushpile affects one’s writerly acumen. I have my suspicions, though.
So what’s the point of all this? Simply to say that I’m optimistic about my current job not killing my writing — especially once I’m again used to, you know, punching a clock and actually doing something.
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