Why You Might Need a Day Job As a Writer
By: Ryan Fan
Tags: Money, Writing, Work, History, Freelancing

Why You Might Need a Day Job As a Writer

Being a full-time writer is not good for my sanity

Photo: Andrea Piacquadio/Pexels

The last couple of months writing ever since the pandemic, I’ve been on a tear. I’ve written more and better than ever, and I wish I could pinpoint a magic formula for it, but the entire writing experience has made me realize one thing:

I need a day job.

I have had a lot of days while not teaching or not doing anything work-related ever since the pandemic hit. I’ve struggled to engage my students on distance learning, and a lot of my calls home went straight to voicemail.

A lot of days, all I did was write. It was cool, and it was great. But do you know where I got most of my ideas from? My job. My life. I’m glad I have more time to write now because I can process all the crazy and absurd things that have happened at work and the transformational lessons of my first year of teaching.

If I didn’t have a day job, well, I would have nothing to write about. Well, I wouldn’t have nothing to write about, but I would feel significantly more limited.

I’m writing more now than at the peak of my school year’s craziness. I could have very easily seen the link that because I was so busy with work and teaching, I couldn’t write as much, and I would have seen the key to my success as a writer as quitting my job.

It wasn’t. Sure, if you look at data, I have been a better writer throughout the pandemic, but the ideas did come from my job and the lessons I learned from it. In a way, work, especially in such a high-intensity and exhausting profession like teaching, was delayed gratification for thoughts and ideas I would have as a writer.

I’m one of those people that can’t be just a writer. I can’t — because what would I do if the writing isn’t going well? Where would I get ideas? How would I interact with people in real life?

Look, I’m not prescribing a day job as a solution to life’s problems, but I’m not dependent on income from writing. I have never been and never will be because I believe in having multiple income streams. If I don’t get a job this summer, I’ll probably pick up DoorDash, Instacart, GrubHub, and other gig economy food delivery options given how precarious driving Uber or Lyft during a pandemic is.

But the point is that if I relied on writing as my primary source of income, I wouldn’t do well as a writer. I don’t work well with that kind of pressure, and my most creative times are when the pressure is off.

Do you know who had a day job as a writer? William Faulkner.

According to Mason Currey at Slate, Faulkner wrote As I Lay Dying before clocking into his night shift as a supervisor at a university powerplant. He slept in the morning, wrote all afternoon, visited his mom on his way to work, and then he worked.

Another famous writer who thrived in his day job was Joseph Heller, who wrote Catch-22. He had a job in magazine advertising in the day while writing Catch-22 at night. For eight years, he spent two or three hours a night writing and gave up once to watch TV with his wife. TV drove him back to writing.

Toni Morrison, for most of her career, not only worked a day job as an editor but also taught two university literature courses and raised two sons as a single parent.

The lesson here isn’t that getting a day job is going to make you a best-selling author: it’s that you should chill out and not take your writing so seriously sometimes. I’m guilty of overthinking and obsessing over anything, and while it’s good that you care about your writing, don’t be overreliant on it.

I know a lot of writers that write full-time. I respect them and sometimes wish I could be them — but there’s a reason why there are two different words for a job and a hobby. A job is something that you need to do to get paid and keep a roof over your head. A hobby is something you do to keep your life fun and interesting.

I don’t know about you, but I’m not as creative in my job as I am in my hobbies. I take fewer risks because of professional repercussions and rules. That might be the difference between teaching and writing, but sometimes I do feel that when I have a bad day at work where everything went completely wrong, I channel some of my frustration and angst into my writing.

If I don’t have at least some time devoted to work, then my hobby takes the place of my work — which constrains me in ways I can’t mentally describe.

Eileen Pollack in Human Parts describes how endless creative time can be a curse for creativity. She explains that most writers, besides maybe Stephen King, would say that too much time outside commitments to structure your day and provide satisfaction, human contact, and identity, can cause you to lose your mind.

And I agree with Pollack. On days when all I do is write, I feel a certain angst that’s counterintuitive to writing itself. I don’t write the whole day anyways. I take breaks after a couple of paragraphs sometimes. Despite my pace of writing, I do step away from the computer frequently, and I’m not some man on a mission, possessed by a demon to write 24/7.

“I can assure you that being free to write around the clock, seven days a week, can destroy your sanity,” Pollack writes.

“Making it” as a full-time writer, for many, is a fantasy — you still need to pay the bills and put food on the table. But for me, my job and everything I do outside of running are like homework for my writing. I write about the lessons I learn at work, the utterly chaotic experiences I have in the classroom that I’ve never seen accurately depicted in a movie or read in a book.

So the best of writers learn and get ideas from life. And even if you would be a better writer if you cut your day job, you need your sanity, and at least for me, being a full-time writer is not good for that.