Get a Haircut, You Know the Rest

[cathschaffstump]

In writing, there are no absolutes. So what I'm advocating today may not be a path you wish to walk, for whatever reasons, but it's one I've been thinking about a lot lately. And that's having another job besides writing.

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In order to understand my motivation, you may need to understand my background. In brief, I grew up VERY poor. I can remember being delighted that I made $9000 in grad school, and it was all for me! I paid for my own college education with scholarships and loans. I knew that there were no parents to bail me out should I run into any financial difficulty, ever. Hell's bells, my parents, paragons of virtue that they were, tried to suck down my first summer college savings because I was more financially responsible than them.

Given that I've done the whole poverty thing, and really didn't enjoy it much, one thing I wanted in my adult life was to have a stable job. I wanted to be a writer too, but you see how those two things just don't mix. So, my strategy was to find a job where I would have some time off to write. I fell in love with teaching during my MA, and my thinking was to get a high school teaching job once my husband moved us to deepest, darkest Western Iowa. My mistake? There is no real time to write. After school gets sewn up with extracurricular activities, and to produce an entire book in a summer after an intense school year didn't work out.

I decided to return to college education. I didn't do much writing when I worked on my doctorate, but I kept my eye on the prize, maneuvering myself into a position where I would have time to write. I did this, receiving my Kirkwood position in 1998. I finished my dissertation in 2001. My job didn't get to where I could write well until 2007, and then I started my writer education.

The flaw of my plan is that I've had to forestall satisfaction until I made it to a particular spot. I had to get my job set up so that there was time to write. I do have a job that's very receptive to it, but you could definitely argue that waiting until the age of 42 to get serious about writing, when you've wanted to do it all your life, is a real drawback. Yet, I would counsel would be writers to have a career. Here's why. Again, these are my reasons, and individuals might see things differently. I am not eschewing these as absolute truths.

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Mirrored from Writer Tamago.