Becoming A Writer: An Exploration Through 2 Books (Scratch & Booklife)

If Google had access to my NLB borrowing history, it would probably start serving me ads for writing masterclasses. Fortunately, not everything has been sold to Alphabet yet. So, I've had to figure out for myself why exactly I've been lurking around the library's "800" (writing & literature under the Dewey decimal system) shelves.

The answer is: I want to be a writer! Which sounds funny coming from someone with a 10-year career in writing; who's paid pretty well for it, even after going freelance. 

There is a stark difference between writing what I want versus what the company wants. I didn't quite get this when I quit my full-time job a year ago. But now I can see that, during those years in corporations, I'd been marinating in a pickling solution designed to leech out all individuality and replace them with key performance metrics.

I mean, it's partly my fault too, for not tending to my personal creative needs. I thought I was satisfied. After all, I was "getting paid to write!!!1" So I threw my heart and soul into work.

Regretfully, I have nothing much to show for that lost decade. Yes sure, I wrote a lot. I wrote maybe 1,000 words a day. Supposing I worked 240 days a year (minus weekends and 20 days' leave), I have spawned some 2.4 million words, bastard children conceived not out of love but in exchange for a few measly shekels. That's, like, 30 novels!

I didn't even know that I had two writers in me — the "real" one and the "work" one — until I read Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living.

We often talk about writers' work the way we do art, which is to say, with studied avoidance of earthly topics like how they make money. So I liked this book immediately for offering a valuable glimpse into the financial lives of authors.

Many writers featured in the book make money through paid writing, i.e. journalism or magazine essays. Sounds like the dream, doesn't it?

It turns out, however, that a job in journalism can be a vortex. In her essay, Not a Complaint, Nell Boeschenstein wrote about her time working at the NPR show Fresh Air with Terry Gross:

At Fresh Air, I was producing as many as five thousand words a week. Those words were — by design and as it should be — in service of another voice. As much as I held that voice in esteem, I, myself, was losing what small ability I had to be heard in my own. I was writing for a living, but I wasn't writing.

And even if it doesn't pay all that well, the paid writing gig tends to override our personal, unpaid projects. Here's Meaghan O'Connell in Sad Birth Lady™:

I was offered a part-time job editing a personal finance site I loved called The Billfold and took it without hesitation. It paid $1,000 a month for work I knew I'd spend most of every day doing [...] I swore I'd start some big work in progress that I'd be able to come back to after my (unpaid) maternity leave, but that never happened either. In reality I managed only to edit the website I worked for.

The scornful skeptic might object that these writers are merely victims of poor time management, not their jobs. If their personal writing was so important, why didn't they make time for it?

To this point I'd like to bring up another book: Booklife, by the ridiculously productive author Jeff VanderMeer.

At the time this book was published (2009), VanderMeer had made the leap from writing around a full-time day job to freelance writing full-time. Either way, his time management skills are epic. With a day job, he wrote fiction during lunch breaks, coffee breaks, and on weekends. He made time for what mattered.

But when he became a full-time freelancer, he found that writing all the time isn't the best thing for his mental or physical health.

Now, as a full-time freelancer, I have both more and less freedom. On the one hand, I am writing all the time. On the other, I am writing all the time. So I need to find new and unique ways to recharge and relax — and I rely more and more on what would seem from the outside like a straitjacket of a schedule.

Now, in case you were wondering, his full-time freelance schedule, according to Booklife, starts from 7:15am, starting the day with some hardcore multi-tasking (exercise bike and reading for his paid book reviews). Then he writes fiction from 8:30am to 11:30am before another round of multi-tasking (brisk walk and brainstorming and email). 

After lunch, he types up his fiction and starts on his paid work at the same time. Somehow he also finds the time for a 2-hour gym session from 4pm to 6pm. He sneaks an extra 60 to 90 minutes of work in after dinner, with 8:30pm as a strict outer limit for work.

8:30pm sounds like a respectable time to stop work... until you realise the man's been working pretty much non-stop throughout the past 13 hours!

If nothing else, I think Jeff VanderMeer's schedule is powerful a negative illustration of how mere mortals — at least, this mortal — can't balance paid writing with personal writing. It's just too tiring. After shitting out 1,000 words for work, the last thing I want to do is write even more.

...

So if I want to start on this project of finding my real voice and writing something I can own, how should I arrange my life? Well, I think both my personal experience and that of the 3 writers above have amply demonstrated that writing for money isn't going to work. So the money has to come from somewhere else.

In Scratch, there are a few other income tracks. Teaching is probably the most common one, although as Alexander Chee notes in his essay, The Wizard: 

Teaching requires accommodating yourself to a set of values that has nothing to do with writing, like pedagogy and earning an MFA or PhD, which takes time away from writing.

Other jobs covered include ghostwriter (Sari Botton), literary agent (Kate McKean), public speaker (Roxane Gay), and visual artist (Austin Kleon). 

But my favourite writer-adjacent occupation is carpenter, which Nina MacLaughlin writes about in With Compliments:

As the year moved into winter, the carpentry work I do [slowed], and I shifted into writing mode. Instead of waking up and racing off to build bookshelves or slam hickory floorboards with a mallet or hand cabinets or frame a deck or swear over installing crown molding, I eased into the days and worked on freelance projects, book reviews, profiles. I liked the rhythm of the year: the cold months at my computer, mid-November through mid-January, the rest spent building, the balance of bodywork and brainwork, the approach and retreat from putting words together.

The idea of "balance of bodywork and brainwork" is appealing, and I think this is why I gravitate towards physical jobs like food delivery and petsitting in my recent forays into alternative work.

Another aspect I find important is the balance between inward and outward attention, a sentiment echoed here by Jeff VanderMeer in Booklife. 

My personal sense of balance requires at least a few hours of walking in the woods every week to truly reset my fragmented, overstimulated mind. As writers, we don't enhance our skills of observation and intuitiveness by sitting in front of a screen 24-7 

I suspect writers find the world of words and content (whether in our minds or in books or on the internet) extremely stimulating, and we need to rest by pointing our attention to the external world.

To avoid feeling used up like so much wood pulp, I feel I must work in a job that's grounded in the physical world. I know my brain loves the chance to observe people (or animals) and their habitats and their amusing antics — as much as my body loves the physicality and exertion of work.

...

So far I've thought a lot about the pragmatic stuff. Like what kind of job is best for balancing the desire to write. But what about the most basic question of all: what do I want to write?

In Booklife, there was a paragraph which seemed to address me rather directly:

No matter how you might want to be a different kind of writer, your blog eventually tells you who you really are by revealing what interests you and moves you to write. Many times I have seen bloggers try to re-imagine themselves by either archiving or deleting an old blog and starting a new one, with fresh emphasis. Most of the time, the new blog starts looking like the old blog within five or six months, in terms of the type of content presented there.

Yep... serial blog-killer here. Related to that, your consumption patterns can also be awfully revealing:

If you aspire to be a mystery writer but the geek/reader part of you has decided to visit mostly fantasy or pop culture sites [...] just be aware that in doing so you are making a choice. Indeed, you may be telling yourself you don't want to write mysteries after all.

I still have some way to go in terms of being honest with myself about what I like and what I want. Being okay with it, not cringing. I fear that the legacy of corporate work is interfering with my sense of self and ability to trust my instincts. How do I draw the real self out of the paid, professional writer?

In Booklife, VanderMeer wrote about 5 forms of inspiration, or places to write "from". They are: 

• write what interests you
• write what's personal
• write what's uncomfortable
• write what's random
• write from prompts

This clued me in to the fact that I have pretty much exclusively written from prompts throughout my employed life! Which is why my brain went blank the instant I sat down to write on my blog. "I've been a writer for almost a decade," I would think. "Shouldn't this be second nature!?" Ah, the power of conditioning... without SEO keywords or client briefs, I was lost.