Writing While Gainfully Employed

How do you write when you have a soul-sucking day job?

Dear Sonal,

How do I survive my brain-numbing [redacted]* day job that I have to pay bills (Damn human meat-suit life that costs money) and still have energy to write?

To note, I just listened to audiobook of Liz Gilbert, Big Magic, where she talks about working and still writing and it made me angry sort of like I’m failing at essential writer life skills.

I have tried writing in my office at lunch but co-workers walk in to chat… or by 1/2 day mark I’m like: fuck, work sucks, and I’m zonked of will to write and then the commute and home and sometimes IG for one hour at night, after I eat with family. Other responsibilities: teenager, dogs, cat, imaginary friends (joke).

How do other writers with day jobs write? I’m in a rut because a) winter and darkkkknnnnness. and b) this is new job and I’m acclimating to new corporate-style work (which tbh I don’t like.at.all but I like food/roof/life necessities.) I know I sound whiny at this point, but where do I fit writing in? And this really warps my brain because I did an online MFA in writing with a newborn so I found time then.

Please reach across the internet ether and solve all my problems. And while you’re at it - please give me winning lotto numbers. I am also very aware that I have job security, food, roof. I am loved by my peeps and I am safe. But I am sad fucking exhausted at end of day.

Sincerely,
Sad Exhausted and Fucking Angry with Life

*As much as I love it as an apt descriptor, I’m compelled to redact D*lbert because the creator of the once popular cartoon strip is a racist scumbag

Dear Sad Exhausted and Fucking Angry with Life,

This is going to be one of those times when I am going to give you advice that I have a very hard time taking myself.

But first, about Liz Gilbert. Now, I have not read Big Magic, nor any of her work, and I know people who are huge fans of Big Magic and Liz Gilbert’s TED Talk on Genius, and I’m sure I’m about to piss them all off…. But let’s not forget that before Liz Gilbert was everyone’s favourite creativity guru, she was the author of Eat, Pray, Love, where she was paid to take a year to indulge in a white lady fantasy of finding herself in Italy, India, and Indonesia, and which somehow became a massive bestseller despite not being a great book, and then it still went on to be a movie starring Julia Roberts. Who does this even happen to? There are multiple impossible writer fantasies contained within this entire scenario, and yet they all happened to Liz Gilbert. So do not concern yourself with Liz Gilbert; Liz Gilbert is entirely too lucky for us mere mortals to compare ourselves to.

Here is what is different about the MFA versus your writing life now. If you didn’t write and turn in things for your MFA, you would fail. You would have spent thousands of dollars in tuition to work with prominent writers, who would ask you why you didn’t turn in assignments. You would have had workshops with a dozen other writers, only for them to ask you when you were going to turn in your writing because they needed to read it. In short, you had structure, external deadlines and accountability. If you didn’t turn up with writing, you would have let down your professors, your fellow writers, and also would fail to obtain your very expensive degree.

But now? Now if you don’t write, you are letting down no one but yourself.

One would think that would be motivating, but the reality is that it’s not. Having to choose between letting down yourself and letting down your co-workers, your boss, your family, your household, your kid, your socially-imbued expectations for how you are supposed to be spending your time in order to be a good person, a good employee, a good parent…..

It’s a lot easier to let yourself off the hook for writing, because frankly, no one else is letting you off the hook for anything else.

We do not live in a world that makes it easy to write. Arguably, it’s gotten harder. We feel pressured to go above and beyond at work, to be seen as a valued employee, and also to keep our income secure so we can feed and shelter ourselves in a world that is increasingly expensive. As parents, we’re expected to be much more involved than previous generations, to be more empathetic and more in touch while monitoring their social media use and encouraging their individuality and yet somehow also keeping them safe and imbued with a deep sense of justice in a complicated world. We’re expected to stay socially conscious and aware of the problems of the entire world, but also check our sources for accuracy and bias, and protest and write in and somehow not get overwhelmed by what often feels like the futility of our individually small actions amid very large problems. We’re also expected to be more environmentally conscious, investing our limited time in minimizing waste which is wonderful but also a drop in the bucket compared to corporate waste, but what else can we do?

So yeah, checking out and spending an hour or seven on social media? Sounds perfectly reasonable.

None of this, however, solves your problem.

It’s easy to blame everything on the job, and indeed, the job is a factor. It may be that one day you’ll have to figure out a different kind of a job, although personally, I am more of in the ‘all jobs are bad’ camp. But I started my working life in well-paying corporate jobs and found it really hard to do the creative work that feeds my soul when I’ve spent most of my day feeling like my soul was dying, only to commute home, make dinner, and because this was in the days before social media, watch TV to numb my brain. If I could only get rid of the need to have a job.

A long convoluted career path later, including a 12 year stint of working for my parents, I was able to do just that; I no longer have a job. One would assume this means I spend huge swathes of the day writing—after all, this is why I put up with working with my parents for so many years—but what I found is that I wrote exactly as much as I did before: pretty much nothing.

A part of this was due to my then-undiagnosed ADHD, but also I found myself regretting not having figured out how to do this when I did have a corporate job, because I lacked the experience to know how to get myself to write. How much more could I have written if I had figured it out?

Even working for my parents, which had a whole set of difficulties, I expected I’d still be able to write because the work was also tremendously flexible. And yet still, I did not write.

You aren’t failing at being a writer with a day job, Sad Exhausted and Fucking Angry with Life, but you might have to take a hard look over your life and see if you struggled to write at other times in your life before this job, and outside of a structured program like the MFA. Because while the job doesn’t help, it might not actually be the job.

Blocks of time are not going to magically open for you, because we don’t live in that kind of world. You’re going to have to simply take the time, and in doing so, say no to some things that are probably pretty important to you. This may seem impossible, but you can rotate and adjust as needed. Maybe you can be a less involved parent, at least some of the time. Maybe a shittier employee. Maybe you’re going to have to risk being rude and say no to friendly co-workers and accept some degree of living in squalor. At least some of the time, anyway.

I remember hearing this same advice years ago and thinking, but I already live in squalor, and I could not be any shittier at my job. But if I look back, there was time—I just chose to spend it zoning out in front of the TV, because it was genuinely hard to summon the motivation to write. Zoning out when you’re tired is always going to be the easier choice than doing creative work. Numbing your brain with little dopamine hits from social media is always going to be a little more addictive.

One thing I learned when I discovered that I had ADHD is that higher dopamine is also part of motivation. And when you’ve used up so much motivation doing the day job… yeah, it’s no wonder you’re feeling zonked at night. But if you can find ways to bring up your dopamine, maybe that will shake off some of the zonked feeling enough to be able to write. Exercise. Music. Colouring. Dance break. Whatever works.

And I know… motivating yourself to get motivated so you can motivate yourself to write when you’re already low on motivation is like, all kinds of levels of impossible.

So you might need more structure and accountability to help support you. You might need a writing buddy, preferably one who also works full-time, that you can check in with for gentle, low-key accountability. You might need to sign up for NaNoWriMo, and take a solid month to ignore everyone. You might need to set a lot of timers and put on noise cancelling headphones and play productivity music. You might need to book a meeting with yourself to do this at work. You might need to go on a writing retreat, either a formal one that you apply for, or a weekend alone at a cheap motel, and then binge write. You might have to engage in some body-doubling and co-working. You might even have to take a class, yes, even if you have your MFA and such, just to give you that missing accountability.

If goals and rewards and checkboxes help you, go for it but keep the goals very tiny so that the rewards are plentiful, and no rewards that feed the beast like “Okay, I get social media time now.” This is always a hit-and-miss strategy for me, since there are few rewards that I have to wait for that can outweigh the pleasure of immediately goofing off, but also because I don’t like making tiny goals. I like making big lofty goals that make me feel like I will accomplish a lot, until I actually sit down to achieve them and the impossibility of the task scares me off starting. “Write 100 words” is so much more achievable than “Finish a short story,” especially since once I start to write 100 words, I will always end up with more, and after a few days of this I will finish the short story anyway. And yet somehow, I feel like “Finish a short story” is a better goal because I am entirely deluded about what I will actually do, and somehow never learn.

I don’t know if Liz Gilbert is blessed with a neurotypical brain and a lack of trauma that allowed her to say “Okay, time to write” and then sit down and block out all the needs of everything else around her and write, but we’ve already established that she’s luckier than most people.

You and I, being not so lucky, are going to have to fight with society’s expectations for us, our own internalized expectations, our brains deciding to make things weird on us, our bad habits, capitalism, modern parenting, our resistance to the blank page. There are going to be days when we win this battle and feed our soul with writing and creative work, and days when we cannot, and we fall back into numbness because it’s just easier. And so we’re going to have to forgive ourselves, a lot, and pick things back up where we left off even if it sometimes feels like, “I wrecked it, never mind.”

I have to believe this is possible, despite never really having been able to consistently write with a full-time day job, because I have to believe that our value as creative beings is more than a side note to the responsibilities the world has heaped upon us. But also, even if it happens in fits and starts, that’s still a good thing.

But I know it’s not easy, and as much as I’d like to wave a magic wand and make all the hard parts go away, I can’t.

I can only tell you that the world needs your work and your voice and that you are worth more than what you can do for other people. Keep prioritizing yourself and your art above all else. Somehow, it will come together.

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Readers, especially those of you who work full time, how do you balance work and writing? How do you get things started on those days when you’re just tired but you haven’t written in forever and know that you really need to? Or is this an ongoing struggle for you too? Comment below.