Should I Quit My Job?
My office.
Every person with a dream and a day job has at one point considered quitting their job to pursue their passion full time. I wonder whether to take the plunge at least twelve times a day. “Quitting fantasy,” to me, is not cursing out my boss, chucking a printer through a window, and setting my computer on fire. It is calmly walking into his office and saying, “Exciting news! I have written a book that will be published, so I shall not be coming in tomorrow.” And then everyone in the office promises to buy it. As far as fantasies go, it’s G-rated, but it still turns me on.
I have known writers at both ends of the spectrum—those who scribble their novels one sentence at a time during lunch and those who leave their non-writing careers to pursue an MFA or novel idea—and those who land somewhere in the middle with part-time work. If you have saved enough money, or perhaps you have a partner or parent willing to support you, go for it. Life is short. For me, it would not have been a responsible decision, and I am responsible with a capital R. My husband and I both had enough law school debt between us to sink a ship, and he had dreams of his own. And, contrary to what I believed in high school, writers are not rich, magical people who live in cloud castles. (Suzanne Collins and Nora Roberts probably live in cloud castles). They are regular people who don’t make much money. Most writers I know supplement their income with freelance editing, ghost writing, and teaching. Even if my dream became my reality—I sold a novel—I’d probably still be broke. But happy. Happy and broke.
So, I had to find a way to balance my job with my writing. Along the way, two pieces of advice stuck with me:
Treat your job like your benefactor
Renaissance painters needed benefactors and so do you. Unless you are Jo March, you can’t write without a computer, and unless you are Edward Cullen, you need food to function. Treating your job like your benefactor turns resentment into appreciation. You’re spending the majority of your waking hours earning money so that you can spend your weekends and evenings doing what you really love without the electricity shutting off.
Caveat: I do not have children. Writers with full-time jobs and children don’t have the luxury of weekends or evenings. Their job is their benefactor so they can feed their kids and write at 3 o’clock in the morning like Rumaan Alam, who I once heard say during an author talk at Books are Magic that he wrote his first novel while his family slept.
The attitude shift from resentment to appreciation is not easy if, like me, you have a hot and cold relationship with your job. I am a lawyer and I work at a firm. My life was never as extreme as Lindsay Cameron’s novel BIGLAW, but it had its moments. Thankfully, no one treated me like shit and I met great friends, but I did once spend 48 hours straight in the office without sleeping, then drove home (bad idea—do not recommend), thought my dog had purple fur, then hallucinated in the shower. Tricking myself into appreciating a “benefactor” that kept me doped up on unhealthy levels of stress, anxiety, and adrenaline while leaving me little to no time to write felt like a cruel joke. I routinely cried over takeout at my desk.
Treat your writing like your illicit lover
In a one-day workshop with Min Jin Lee at the Center for Fiction, she gave this advice to a room full of mothers, teachers, retirees, scientists, students—all hopeful writers trying to figure out how to live while dreaming. She gave the same advice in a pep talk here. I emailed it to Stefan Merrill Block, an amazing writer and teacher, who said, “Yes, meet your novel in hotel rooms in the middle of the afternoon, in stolen minutes on your coffee break, whatever you need to do to see it to fruition.” My husband would probably agree I’m having an affair with my novel. I send secret emails with ideas, hide my computer screen so he can’t read what I’m typing, and spend every weekend ignoring him while I type like I’m trying to deactivate a bomb. These hours of writing feel precious to me. All week I can’t wait to have them. That sacred feeling also adds an urgency to my writing—every word must count. I wonder whether, if writing was my job instead of my hobby, it would become a slog. Hopefully, I’ll get to find out someday.
Other tidbits:
Read this: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/10/20/late-bloomers-malcolm-gladwell
Join a writing space like this: http://thehatcherypress.com/