Unleash My Inner Puppy

In one of my online profiles, I describe myself as a Bookworm stuck in Corporate Plumbing. Well, I’m one of those writers who cannot afford to live on my writing income. Even with a busy school visit schedule, I would barely make ends meet if I decided to live on it.

So I have a part-time day job – rather I always had the day job and a few years ago I decided to go part-time to give me more time to write. The balance between three days at a well-paying job and four days for writing, living life and everything else in between seems sensible. Many colleagues at my day job envy my work-life balance. They are impressed that I have a “hobby” and I pursue it with all my passion and I am able to balance the both.

Those who know me know that I have a foot outside the day-job door all the time. I keep threatening to quit. I don’t yearn for promotions and big responsibilities at the day-job. I am always dreaming about a writing life that isn’t limited by schedules and calendars. I want to travel, read, go on walks and do more school visits without worrying about taking time off from work and compromising commitments.

But is writing my hobby or my profession? Is this balance working? This is a question I ask myself almost everyday.

If you met me on the street, I would always introduce myself as a children’s writer. My social media is dedicated to writing and my writing friends with an occasional crossover of work or school friends. My holidays are planned around book activities and I spend my money on books, stationery, writing, writing courses and an occasional handbag. (Well okay, more than occasional handbag).

Why do I feel restrained? Why can’t I be happy with the balance I have now? Why is a day-job like a leash that ties my inner-puppy?

a)     I am a morning person. I write in the mornings. So on the three days I work, I have to stop writing mid-point. If the words are flowing (and they often don’t) stopping them on the clock is a torture. I just want to keep writing until I run out of steam and then do whatever else is required. But given I’m in a serious grown-up job, I need to be at my desk at regular hours and that often makes me tug at my leash. 

b)    I can’t travel as frequently as I want to – be it for festivals or school visits or just travel to research my books. Wherever I am, I need to get back to my cave by Sunday night to start the day job on Monday. There are events I turn down because they are on days I cannot commit. I can’t take off to visit the places I want to research because I have to be at work. While I’ve been managing it with obsessive calendar control, I do resent the leash often for its restraint.

c)     The job itself sometimes can be less than fun. I should confess it’s okay most of the time. There was a time when I was passionate about the day job the same way I am now with writing. But now I’m merely good at it. I’ll never slack and I will always give it 100% but sometimes it feels life is going past me as I earn a living. 

But is it all bad? Is the leash a good thing for this attention-deficit inner-puppy?

a)     Firstly my job pays me well. My retreats and holidays, subscriptions and stationery loot are all courtesy of my day-job. I hardly spend my writing income – almost treating it as a souvenir of the writing than a source of income. Although I should say, the Chancellor of the Exchequer doesn’t treat it as a souvenir.

Holiday in Switzerland

Growing up lower middle-class with no luxuries and very often nose pressed against my friends’ windows, I worry about throwing away a job that pays well. What if I need to take care of my parents? What if I never get another book contract? What if I want to go on a holiday and I can’t afford it?

b)    Secondly my day job makes me use my right brain. I manage, organise, plan, budget, resolve, negotiate and more. I work with nice and difficult people. I write presentations (yes) and attend conference calls (oh yes) and meet people from different parts of the world.

If I wrote full-time I would be stuck in my room writing or trying to write all day. Or at least that’s what I worry about. What if no one wants to have coffee with me? What if I spend an entire week without talking to another human? What if I am turn into a Facebook profile and a twitter human who hates sunlight? Or in contrast, I might fritter away all my time doing events or socialising or attending talks and courses that I forget to write.

c)     Thirdly I think, the peace of mind that the day job gives makes me less desperate. I can take any amount of time to write a new book. I don’t have to write today to buy bread or rice tomorrow (mostly because I’m on a no-carb diet) – but you get the drift. If I had to sell a piece of writing to pay rent or eat a meal, I might be homeless and hungry often. Somehow I feel busking is not a writer thing. No one would want to throw a coin into my cap to watch me write.

I talk to writers in different stages of their writing careers. And they all tell me that it’s good to have a day job. Many do this full-time. But often many don’t. As someone pointed out to me recently, J K Rowling can do this full-time. Yes of course. But some are definitely exceptions and legends.

If you search our blog here, you will find over the years, many of us have grappled with this question. And in our own ways, we have to come up with an answer ourselves.

But apart from the time vs. money aspect, there are other things that make me want to be free of a day job.

As a bookworm – I want to read widely. I have a tottering pile of books that are waiting with bookmarks – books I have dived into and don’t have time to come back to.

As a writer, I want to practice the Zen of Writing – dive into my subconscious, mine my memory, do things that would excavate my mind-well for those inner fears and joys that make good writing.

School Visit near Liverpool, England

·      As an author, I want to visit more schools, festivals, museums – wherever else they’d let me talk about my books, about stories from India and meet children who are fascinated by faraway stories. Just like I was when I read those English books in a coastal city in India.

But more importantly, as a human, I want to live life – for my own good and others. Travel and see this world, wonder at the planet (before climate deniers destroy it), use my time to teach in remote parts of Asia, do things I’m afraid of – be it bungee jumping or living in a hut with no toilets or look after animals or just living without a leash.

In an orphanage near Colombo, Sri Lanka

Sometimes I call this my mid-life crisis. Maybe it is. Or maybe this is a creative crisis every writer goes through. Maybe this leash is the tension that the puppy needs to stay focussed. Or one might argue that all puppies should be free to play.

I don’t know yet. Maybe I’ll be brave enough to walk away from the leash in a year’s time or I’ll never be able to. Either way, as any writer does, I use my leash as yet another distraction to think loudly here in this blog to avoid going back to the work in progress. Some things never change.

What degrees do you need to have to be a writer? - Clémentine Beauvais

That's one question I often get asked by French teenagers. It's not entirely surprising: the French education system, French society in general, and the French middle-class in particular, is absolutely obsessed with diplomas, qualifications, school rankings and fine distinctions between different types of degrees that determine your worth in the eye of the rest of your social sphere.

the complete mindf*** of the French higher education system (source) - graph already far outdated as it changes roughly every Tuesday

I generally reply that you don't need any degrees at all, that many authors don't have a baccalauréat (A-Level equivalent), that many haven't been to university, that plenty have seemingly entirely unconnected degrees - business, physics, geography, sports science - and that the Most Important Thing is that you enjoy writing and probably that you encounter stories in many different media, including through books.

Except, of course, high school students are not stupid, and they can see very well that the vast majority of children's authors they encounter have another, 'main' job which is very likely to just so happen to be one of the following:

- teacher
- librarian
- school librarian
- university lecturer
- book seller
- kindergarten teacher
- some other teaching thing
- more library-related stuff
- special needs educator
- some education-related stuff to do with books
- some book-related thing that has something to do with education

etc. Some, to be fair, are editors, freelance editors, publicists, or journalists...

I'm exaggerating, of course, but the situation is indeed comical: at book fairs, 'we' writers mostly talk about our books and our... students. Put two writers together and they'll doubtlessly talk about their teaching. 

So I like to rephrase that question. You don't need any degrees to be a writer, but most writers you meet are very likely to have very similar degrees and indeed quite similar professions. 

And then we think about it together. Why might it be that writers are so attracted to teaching? Or is it that teachers become attracted to writing? Or are both correlated with something else? What might that be? Does doing literary studies help you become a better writer? Or do you do literary studies because you're already interested in all things literary? Are all teachers frustrated writers? Are all librarians frustrated writers? Are all writers frustrated librarians?

Is your teacher secretly a writer?

(All gazes turn to the teacher, who generally vehemently rejects the accusation.)

Turns out diplomas don't matter, but you can still sneak in a lot of interesting sociological reflection. Including, if you want to push it as far as that with a dynamic group, why those 'other jobs' that writers do are so often, well, extremely middle-class (it's particularly striking in the French children's literature landscape, I think, though the term 'middle-class' has no easy equivalent in French). Cue reflection on what the writer-teacher-librarian association might, well, teach us about the social and cultural politics of writing and publishing today.

Then the question is answered by more questions being raised.

So I feel like I've done my teaching duty, and put my degrees to good use.

The Other Job - Ruth Hatfield

I’m in Qatar at the moment, doing my ‘other’ job, archaeology. I wouldn’t call it a day job, because in reality I don’t do much digging these days – I wish I could say it’s because I’ve too much writing to do, but actually it was having a baby that made stints abroad difficult to arrange. But I was lucky enough to be offered a chance of work with the Origins of Doha project, which was far too good an opportunity to pass up for all the obvious reasons – Travel! Adventure! An actual wage! So off I went.

Small walls in Qatar. Copyright: Qatar Museums

It’s got me thinking again about writers and their other work, the benefits and downsides thereof. It seems that the news is full of writers earning less and less, and having to return to other kinds of employment to pay the bills, and I think it’s pretty reasonable to argue that this isn’t a good thing. Mainly because writing well takes a lot of time and concentration and development, and doing it around other jobs is not only difficult but basically means sacrificing other elements of your life, such as family and breathing.

I always dreamed of being a writer. I never dreamed of being an archaeologist, until I ended up studying it by accident at university and discovered how endlessly fun and fascinating it could be (sometimes). And when I became a full-time archaeologist after I graduated, writing went straight out of the window – I was far too tired to pull anything sensible together on a page. I suppose I always thought that if I got the chance, I’d give archaeology up and happily write full time.

But I can’t leave archaeology alone anymore. Even when I’m writing, I sometimes find myself sitting back and dreaming about it, wishing so strongly to be digging again. And even though I’m often asked if it’s the stories element of archaeology that draws me to it, and I say that yes, that’s something to do with it, I don’t think that’s really the whole picture, these days.

Field archaeology, which is what I do, basically involves taking a site apart and trying to understand how it developed. Telling its story, of course. But on the level at which I do it, it’s basically a puzzle of which layers go over which other layers, sometimes a simple puzzle, sometimes not so simple. And I guess therein lies the appeal.

I find writing extremely complicated. Far too complicated, often. People say trying to understand an archaeological site is like trying to solve a jigsaw when you only have a few pieces, and you don’t know how big it is or what shape it is. That’s a fair summary. But to me, writing it like trying to solve a jigsaw when you have to first make each piece yourself, and all out of different materials because you don’t have enough of one thing. And then when you try to put the jigsaw together, you realise you’re sitting in a room full of mice, all of whom are trying to take your pieces and eat them or steal them away to line their nests with. After that, digging feels like surfacing from too long underwater.

I don’t say this because I'm moaning about writing - I’ve already found myself grabbing a paper and pen in my spare time here, and I love it more than ever when it's busting out, unforced. But it’s making me think that full time writing might not actually be what’s best for me, despite my dreams. Being able to write whenever you like is one thing, but having to write all the time is a very different beast, and I’m not good at feeling satisfied with my work, either the quantity or quality of it, when I write. Constant dissatisfaction wears me down, and I know it’s a problem I need to address, but I don’t think it’ll ever go away enough for me to really feel I’m doing well. When I dig, there is a huge amount of satisfaction to be found in earth shovelled, contexts peeled apart, small objects retrieved and a straight-sided trench  that deepens by the day.

I suppose, in summary, the reason I write is because there is one place I feel entirely myself: alone at my desk, pen in hand, paper before me. I’ve always known that place, and I’ve always felt that way about it. But now, it seems, there’s another place where I feel like myself – a completely different version, but a strong and vital one all the same. And that’s kneeling on the ground with a trowel in my hand, following something in the dirt. And I’m finding, these days, that I can’t love one without the other. I'm sure I'm not alone in this.

A Tale of Two Activities - Clémentine Beauvais

If you're reading this post in the morning of the day it's come out, send me a positive brain wave and cross your fingers for me: I'm currently shaking fretting panicking calmly getting ready for a job interview in a university somewhere in the UK...

So I'm taking this blog post as an opportunity to reflect on the difficulties and joys of having another job in addition to writing, one that you really don't want to give up on. Most people tend to assume that I'm secretly dreaming of being a full-time writer. I often hear, 'Are you keeping up the academic side just for the money?'

That's easily answered in MS Paint:

To most people, if you have an 'artistic' side, anything else you do must surely be 'paying' for your artistic activity. If you're not giving up the 'day job', it probably means the artistic one doesn't earn you anything, or not enough. 

Even my academic colleagues have somehow internalised the notion that I would 'prefer' to write children's books as a full-time job; that it's what I really want to do. We were talking at lunch about what we'd do if we won the lottery (yes, students: that's the kind of thing your lecturers and tutors talk about at lunch), and several colleagues said that they'd quit their job immediately. I said I certainly wouldn't stop working - I like my research and teaching, and I'd get bored. The immediate response was, 'But you could spend all the time you want on writing your children's books!'

Frankly, if I really wanted to spend all my time writing children's books... well, I would take the jump and do it. And if I needed a job to subsidise this activity, I probably wouldn't opt for one that requires hours of teaching, reading, essay-marking, meeting-going, networking, jargon-deciphering, revise-and-resubmitting, email-sending at two in the morning, in a crazy incertain job market, with no weekends to speak of, holidays that are in fact conferences, and the absolute impossibility to stick to regular hours.

Well then, are you keeping up the academic job as a safety net, 'just in case the writing doesn't work out?'

(The notion of academia as a 'safety net' is just... I mean, I wish, but...)

If the writing didn't 'work out', it would probably be in part because of the other job. Writing success isn't some esoteric thing that does or doesn't work out according to the unpredictable movements of the stars - the more you work on it, the more likely it is to 'work out'. You might never be J.K. Rowling, but you can get very respectable sales by being strategic, working hard, meeting children and promoting your books. This is more difficult when you've got another job.

So of course, having another job isn't ideal for your publishers, agents and publicists. There is definitely faint pressure to 'quit the day job' and be a full-time author. School visits and festivals often happen during the week. Even if you can make some of it, you can't be one of these writers who do school visits all the time. Therefore your books might not sell as well, and you might not get as high an advance next time, or even asked for another book.

Gone are the days when it was acceptable to write your books in your 'free time', and to decide that this year, you'll only publish one, or none. It doesn't work like that in the UK (to a degree, it still does in France). The publish or perish rule applies here like it does in academia; being a part-time writer will always put you at a disadvantage.

Implicitly, there is pressure also from other authors and illustrators who are full time. There's a very legitimate worry that writers like me contribute to making our activity appear unprofessional, amateurish, dilettantish, something you do 'when you've got the time', or if a partner is subsidising your indulgent bohemian bourgeois lifestyle. I entirely understand this concern, and it does bother me that I contribute to this vision. Authors and illustrators should absolutely be in a position to live - and to live well - thanks to their work. Saying that your writing brings you 'pocket money' or is 'a fun thing on the side' is quite insulting to the rest of the community.

But choosing not to choose is perhaps the only authentic option when you have the luxury of having two activities that bring you different rewards, different challenges and different joys. And many people, I'm sure, secretly want to do not just one thing, but several. Recently a student asked me for career advice (I know, terrifying). She said she was split, because she wanted to be a film maker, but 'not just': she was also considering being a researcher in psychology, or perhaps a teacher, or even a consultant. Why can't we do several things at the same time, when we have so many interests?

I agreed of course, but said the reasonable thing: doing several jobs, especially an artistic one and another 'official' one, is difficult. She said 'Well, you manage it!' I told her 'managing' was a strong word - she doesn't see the moments when I'm marking essays all evening before updating my PowerPoint for a school visit the next day, or playing Google-Calendar-Tetris with deadlines on fiction-writing and article submissions and conference abstracts and book edits.

Since I was making it sound like my life was only slightly less sinister than that of the Baudelaire orphans, she blurted out: 'But you're happy, aren't you?'. I had to admit that I am...

_____________________________________

Clementine Beauvais writes children's books in French and English. She blogs here about children's literature and academia and is on Twitter @blueclementine.

Is it a Job or is it a Career? Megan Rix / Ruth Symes

Have you seen comedian Chris Rock's stand-up routine on You Tube about whether you have a job or a career? The link is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HG9paM_3QRM  or you can put Chris Rock job or career into Google and it comes up straight away.

I hadn't seen it before until my husband told me about it one evening when he arrived home feeling down about his job. It's very funny (but be warned Chris Rock does love swearing!)

Basically what he says is if you have a career there's never enough time in the day to get all the work that you want to do done. I'm always wanting more hours to write in (especially at the moment - time for another weekend away at a hotel to just write I think!). But if you have a job rather than a career you spend the day looking at the clock/watch and counting down the hours until it's time to go home. In a career you want more time to work and in a job you want less.

It certain rang true with me and a lot of people I know. But not always in as clear-cut way as Chris Rock put it. When I was working I loved my job and knew it was worthwhile - the only problem was that I longed desperately to write and when I wrote I felt like I was complete and when I did anything else I was just killing time or worse wasting it when I could have been writing.

Then I had the BIG talk with myself about what you really want to do with your life, supposing you only had one year left how would you spend it, what would you be truly disappointed never to have done...

I knew that it was wise to stay working until I could support myself and so I went down to part-time and then temporary work. Only the less hours I spent at work the more hours I could write and the more hours I got to write the more I wanted to do more. :)

Now happily I write full-time under the names of Ruth Symes and Megan Rix although I don't think I write as many words a day as I did when I was still working full-time and the words would come bursting out because I'd held them in for so long. I always wish I could write more... no picture books for ages ... and I used to write for TV...

What's it like for you?

Ruth's latest book is published by Piccadilly

Megan Rix' latest book is published by Puffin

Keep Your Day Job - Heather Dyer

copyright Fountain_Head

“If only I had more time,” we often say, “I’d be able to finish my novel.” We feel that if only we could live the ideal ‘writer’s life’ (alone in an isolated cottage overlooking the sea, perhaps) we could write our masterpiece. But how many writers actually live this sort of life? And is it really helpful?
 
The truth is that not many writers can be productive for an eight-hour day. Personally, I can only manage two hours at most before I have to do some admin or run an errand. I might go back to my book later in the day, but I can’t write all day, every day. In fact, I have come to believe that pushing on before your work is ready can actually be counterproductive. It can mean taking your story down the wrong track, or not going deep enough.

Having a day job (or other responsibilities) means we have to do our writing in short bursts when we get the chance. But this has some advantages.

1. Being committed to non-writing activities frees up our unconscious, so that it can find solutions while our thinking brains are otherwise engaged. Trying to think our way out of a plot problem is rarely successful. Answers seem to come in the form of images or ideas that occur to us while we’re in the middle of doing something else

2. Something else that a day job can do for our writing is to help us take it less seriously. Having a day job means that writing can remain a labour of love; something that you do for fun, as opposed to something that you do because you have to. As Frank Cottrell Boyce says: "real creativity should feel like a game, not a career..."

3. A day job also means that we have to interact with the sort of people we might never otherwise meet – and since it is primarily through our interactions with others that we develop and mature, a day job can often provide our richest life experience and some of our best material.

Carol Lloyd, in her insightful book Creating a Life Worth Living, classifies day jobs into ‘No Contest’ jobs, ‘Wellspring’ jobs and ‘Big Tent’ jobs. Wellspring jobs (like copywriting or journalism) use the same skills you use in your own writing. These jobs may improve your technique, but can if too demanding they can sap your creativity, leaving none left for your own work. The No Contest job (working in a bookshop or gardening, for example) typically don’t require you to invest too much mental energy, but may not pay very well. Big Tent jobs involve working in the industry (like teaching creative writing or working in publishing) and can be useful for networking.

So, although we may dream about living the ‘writer’s life’, we mustn’t lose sight of the fact that the first requirement of being a writer is to live fully. The writer who cuts themselves off from the rest of the world may be limiting the source of their inspiration. A day job or family responsibilities can give us a sense of belonging and make us feel part of the world. And when you stop thinking about your writing, you allow unconscious to get to work on it. Most importantly a day job leaves our writing where it’s meant to be: somewhere we can escape to – a place where we can play. Perhaps having to fit our writing in around a day job isn’t such a bad thing after all?



Heather Dyer - children's author and Royal Literary Fund Consultant Fellow

• For enquiries about creative writing workshops for children or adults, or editorial services, go to www.heatherdyer.co.uk
• For enquiries about academic writing workshops, go to:  http://rlfconsultants.com/consultants/heather-dyer/