Great piece. Funny how there's a Romantic movement on Substack when nothing is less Romantic than Substack. Imagine: "Cormac McCarthy struggled for years at magazine launch parties, getting rejected by It Girls like Madeline Cash until his newsletter, Grey Matters, was ranked #3 in literature."
Nice post, ARX, but I don't quite agree with your characterizations here. One can suffer plenty and still work a job; furthermore, the time compression involved in working a real job often forces brevity and economy in writing - no procrastination, one becomes better with one's time. For example, one relative of mine has responsibilities piled to the sky, and throwing another one on the pile is no big deal; another relative has almost no responsibilities, and getting this person to do the simplest thing is like climbing Mount Everest. I'll quote Librarian of Celaeno here:
“It is also important to bear in mind as well that Boccaccio, a writer of the highest caliber, had a day job. Like the Gen-Xers to come, he sold out and went into working world, taking up the family mantle of civic responsibility. He went on important missions for Florence and performed a number of government jobs, including welcoming Petrarch to the city, beginning a great and influential friendship. But he was never fully free to pursue his art, a fact true of nearly every artist then and up to the present. Consider that greats like Brunelleschi and Michelangelo were businessmen working on commissions; their time spent managing staff and studios must have far outweighed their time with brush and chisel. Even profoundly prolific writers like C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien were employed full-time as professors and had all the demands of family life (weirdly in Lewis’s case) as well. Let this be a lesson to those of us who would be artists if we had more time; we always have time to do the things that are important to us. The habits of industry and discipline mean as much as imagination and creativity.” From here: https://librarianofcelaeno.substack.com/p/the-retvrn-of-giovanni-boccaccio
Regarding the nature of suffering itself, yes, one can tell a writer or speaker who's suffered versus one who hasn't, and the difference is stark. I attended a talk last night where the speaker said all the right things, but said it in a smooth and confident way (like a Stephen Colbert) that betrayed a lack of suffering - and for that reason I didn't like the guy on first impression, and felt somatically a desire to stay away from discussion from him after.
Lastly, if you don't mind me saying so, I quite enjoyed your "Incel", but it seems to me that the only direction to go after exploring the ubiquitous nihilism of modern society is to think about and work out a solution to it that works for you. That, to me, is *much, much, muchhhhhhhhh* harder than simply writing another novel.
Except I disagree respectfully. Yes writing requires effort but I hate this implicit and very Protestant vibe that great art requires work which implies austerity and suffering. Writing requires work and effort which is linear, but it also requires richness of experience, which McCarthy did in spades too. Got your heart broken? That will enrich your craft. Been to a chemsex orgy? Ditto. Got fired? Been to jail? Moved country? Ask a girl out and she turns you down or doesn’t? Etc etc.
Writing isn’t this solipsistic exercise of you alone with a typewriter. It’s a communion between the world of experience and the world of thought. Live a goldfish in a bowl life, writing won’t be very good.
Men have this monastic tendency to monomania, but we are creatures of the senses and we have hearts that break easily. That imo is the essence of art and good writing.
I just wrote about exactly this on here (the ethics of falling).
i have quit numerous comfortable jobs to pursue life (travelling, writing, more time with my kids, moving abroad, writing), first at 20, then 25, 28, 39, lastly at 50. regrets? of course, a few. but that in between time freedom, that “ah unemployed again!” rush from walking away from another job, is worth its weight in spiritual gold.
Great post. Honesty is always helpful and inspiring. For what it’s worth I’m 62 and I’m doing nights and weekends while trying to make enough money off of my normie business to pay for the things my family needs. I don’t feel like writing is a choice or an option. The Muse is a goddess, and she commands us. That’s how it feels. The project I’m working on is ridiculously long. I sometimes think no one else will like it. But I actually know two people will like it. That’s an existence proof. Since two people have seen what I’ve written so far, and and they are trustworthy, and they tell me they like it, that means that it’s possible for someone else to like it. That also means it’s possible there will be more than two! It’s very important to have at least that minimal level of support. It’s difficult to keep going sometimes, but I don’t know how to stop, and I don’t want to. I want to finish what I’ve started. And when I finish this, I have so many other things I want to write afterwards I will be dead before I finish it all. We’ll see if I can sustain my life and health long enough to do more.
For the past year I've been trying to create some kind of ascetic life for myself. It's a pleasant exercise in living but so far it hasn't helped my writing.
You mention buying new clothes, eating at restaurants as the comforts you miss. I don't miss those things very much. The main problem for me is lack of community, lack of interaction & connection with people who have shared values. When you are living a life based around work & hobbies, it is easy to find people with shared values.
Since I started writing I've met many other amateur writers, including people with shared aesthetic values. But everyone I've met is pursuing a standard, white-collar career plus hobby lifestyle. And don't get me wrong, that's a good life, I'm just trying to do something different.
There have been many essays about the decline of bohemianism. Rising material expectations are part of it. But I tend to think bohemianism requires in-person community to sustain itself. Alternative culture has long since moved online, but the simulacrum of human interaction the internet provides turns out to be pretty thin gruel.
Is community the missing part of the equation that would make the suffering part more sustainable? Sounds like each time you tried it, you did it alone. But couldn't a community of people with similar values and lifestyle choices solve some of the problems, e.g., you create your own subculture in which you are actually high status for your dedication to your art...
There's a lot in here that I resonate with, but I will (good-naturedly) push back a bit here.
First, regarding the "great art requires great suffering" point -- I have gone back and forth on this, but ultimately land more on the camp of agreeing that it does. I myself have gone through the cycle of:
1) vulgar romanticization of the "tortured artist"
2) vulgar reaction against step 1, thinking it "problematic" and "fetishizing mental illness"
3) some sort of middle-ground synthesis of the two (admitting to yourself that Van Gogh cutting off his ear was badass, but maintaining ironic distance about it in conversation), and finally,
4) realizing that ultimately yeah, actually, you need to have been through some shit to have something interesting to say.
There are ostensible counter examples, like Proust, who on paper at least lived a spoiled, easy life. But could Dostoevsky write Brothers K without his several near-death experiences? I don't think so. A couple of caveats being here that first, it is NOT true that the more you suffer, the better your art is (the relationship is not linear, but probably more logarithmic), and secondly, it's worth calling out that your suffering need not be a result of easily narrativized external events, and is often just a result of a highly sensitive nervous system (some suffer in their minds more than in reality).
Related to this, and where my disagreement comes in -- suffering need not be financial. T.S. Eliot is a good example here - a man who held a steady job (likely acquired through nepotism) at a bank, but who was able to write The Wasteland, a poem of great pain and desolation, in part because of his refined philosophical and poetic sensibilities, and also in part because of a bad marriage. Here was a man with great financial security but also great unhappiness. You do not need to have your bills canceled to experience pain in life.
Regarding your thoughts on writing while working, and the frustrations of not being able to commit oneself fully -- I think that your grousings are very justified. And yet I do not think it is simply a matter of you being a petty-bourgeois coward (don't be so hard on yourself), but also just the way things are.
Living standards have increased, but also living expenses (in the Global North), and as a result, the required time and psychic/mental energy to maintain a middle-class life have increased in recent years. Kafka was able to work at almost part-time hours and fulfill his economic obligations. I doubt T.S. Eliot was pulling investment banking hours as well. The Lost Generation barely worked at all. These are perhaps some cherry-picked examples, but I think you can agree with the overall sentiment. Before, one could still be a petty-bourgeois coward, and still have the time to write. Nowadays, it feels more difficult.
And beyond work hours -- our minds are simply more occupied. First, let's get out of the way the clichés about the attention economy: we are distracted by our phones, Netflix, TikTok, etc. Ok, there's that, which is undoubtedly true.
Beyond this, and more interestingly, I'll also bring in Byung Chul Han's analysis of the "achievement subject". It is not simply that the rent is too damn high, that the kids can't stop with their damn phones... but also that after the shift to a post-Fordist, information economy, stable jobs enforced by external discipline gave way to greater flexibility (and instability) and along with this, a constant internal self-exploitation. Now, we are "entrepreneurs of the self", with an unending internal compulsion to achieve, to produce. Now, leisure time is subsumed by the logic of self-optimization (see: wellness trackers, apple watches, Andrew Huberman, etc). Now, our natural state is exhaustion and a constant feeling of burnout as well as the simultaneous guilt for not achieving in spite of it. Now, the deep concentration and boredom required for creativity is a radical counter-cultural act. And you still blame yourself for not having the time and energy to write a goddamn novel outside of work?
I'm not saying that it's impossible to write a great novel with a full-time job these days. But I am saying that I believe it's harder than ever before. Perhaps you DO need to drop it all and live in poverty to become the next Cormac McCarthy. But I sometimes wonder if even McCarthy could, in contemporary times, be able to get by on manual labor, or whatever he did, and then so easily commit himself to writing Blood Meridian. In all likelihood, he would have had to take on multiple jobs. And even assuming that he didn't, he would nevertheless have had to deal with the distractions, mental exhaustion, and pressure of modern life. Even maintaining a "poor" lifestyle these days requires more time and energy than before. Boomers had a very different economic experience - I don't think it's worth comparing their situation to ours.
Really, the ideal setup for a contemporary artist is 1) be born into a rich, but fucked up family that gives you the time, funds and suffering required 2) throw out your phone and 3) perhaps get deep into some sort of meditation practice that allows you to tune out the noise. For the rest of us, though, we will have to constantly battle the world to carve out the leisure time and silence necessary for our craft. I suppose what I'm ultimately saying is that -- you're not alone.
Here's me: 49, wrote two novels in my 20s that were not published, wrote one in my 30s that I self-published at 39, countless odd jobs, journalist gigs, agency copywriter for over ten years, now unemployed thanks to the industry, the economy, my age, and AI (not necessarily in that order). And here's the upside: I'm am now writing full time. I've messed with a new book for the past 6 years and it was becoming even more fragmented than the last: you spend a 10 hour day writing stuff for other people, it's not easy to then write for yourself. I am now writing 8 hours a day - and don't get me wrong, sometimes you only get a page out of that! But I have NEVER in my near-half-century on this planet had this kind of uninteruppted time (forgot to mention the kids grew up and moved out!). And there is nothing like it. NOTHING. I don't think you can write the best novel you can write without this kind of time. I kind of wish I realized that 20 years ago. But I'm 20 years of writing the better writer now, so it's all gravy.
Here's the way I think about it, regarding the whole job thing: think of it as your own startup business. What is it, 25 percent of them fail in the first year? More? Think of it like that, you took this mega loan, you aren't even going to be paying yourself for the first two years anyway. You're writing every day: you're WORKING, you actually do have a job! You just aren't getting paid yet. In my case I'm just burning down savings to survive at the bare minimum while doing this. If it doesn't get published? Oh well I'm in the 25 percent that didn't make it, I'll get a another job (knocks on wood). If it works and I get a book deal? Hell yeah I just achieved the only dream I've ever had.
Do I suggest this course of action for everyone? If you can do it, you should. Your writing doesn't require your full attention, but your best writing does.
As a fellow middle-aged dude trying to balance making enough to support a family and trying to build a writing "career," this is extremely relatable. Hang in there, brother.
I relate to this so much. I used to watch Christopher Nolan's The Prestige and chide myself for not being more like Christian Bale's character, willing to orient my entire life around my art and materially suffer as a result of it.
But then I came to realize that the normie artist grind is its own type of struggle. A more comfortable struggle for sure, but a struggle nonetheless. Writing on nights and weekends after long hours of PMC nonsense is incredibly difficult and requires a discipline and strength of spirit others don't have. It is a lifestyle choice of its own kind, in the same vein as McCarthy choosing to live out of motel rooms.
A while back, I was laid off from a fantastic job, and so I began shooting out as many applications as possible. After a few months, I got one call back; custodian at local college. I was desperate and had to take it, so I tried to convince myself it’d be a good thing, and would give me more mental processing power to put into writing. It did, but I was so consistently miserable in other areas of life that it wasn’t worth it.
Great post. Another Catch-22-ish aspect of the demands of regular work vs writing is that the struggle to earn a living can be the kind of thing that informs and inspires your writing. When you give up the struggle, it's entirely likely you'll feel uninspired.
Another ARX post, another chance for me to quote Andrei Tarkovsky: "Modern man, however, does not want to make any sacrifice, even though true affirmation of self can only be expressed in sacrifice."
On a slightly less serious note, I think the idea you have to give up your job and all that isn't really true. If it were, covid would have produced a bunch of great novels, when people had all the time in the world. Personally I do much better with the structure of work and then writing in my free time. When I used to have the summers off, I accomplished nothing.
20-25 work hours a week + investing (lol) + writing full-time is where it’s at. I went the turbo-poverty route for a bit while writing my books, and it worked because I took no days off and had definite goals. It felt very liberating, but there always comes a point where the self-inflicted misery catches up to the misery of not being understood/noticed/etc., and you realize you can be just as productive while also not being a complete bum. (That realization definitely stings for a bit, though.) In fact, I actually like the tension that having a few other gigs going creates. I think the occasional frustration of one’s output actually leads to renewed resolve and a stronger output. Any time I’ve had a wide-open schedule to write, my productivity has dropped. I’d say, at least for me, it’s about balance, while always giving slight priority to your writing so that you can keep moving up the proverbial ladder of this industry.
Thank you for this, ARX. I felt its pains acutely.
I think the history of literature has shown us that great work is not only a function of hours spent and asceticism / discipline adhered to. There have been plenty of bangers written on lunch breaks, in slow seasons, in the interstices across many years. What is required more than time is *faith*: faith in your abilities as an artist, and faith in the goodness and necessity of the project at hand. E.g.: the best thing I've written took ten years and three totally different drafts while working various jobs, being severely ill, and being a student; it took me nine years to figure out the final sentence (lol, lmao even). On the one hand: obnoxious! On the other hand: for whom exactly should I have rushed? Regardless, it was my faith in the project that got the thing done.
"What do I need to make *this thing* great?" is a more productive question, in my experience, than "What do I need to make great things?" A fact that got hammered into my dumb recalcitrant brain when I began to fall down the chronic illness staircase: *We only ever have what's at hand.* Get something in front of you, shape it up, share it, and make peace. If you're lucky, you'll get to do that at least a handful of times before it's all over. I encourage you not to worry about the context for your art's production as much. It's quite easy to fall into the pit of comparison with the available biographies / hagiographies.
And please contextualize all of this advice with: My only "advantage" here is having gotten a lot of books out into the world, but ultimately I'm just a guy. Take or leave whatever's helpful & season to taste.
I find myself frustrated by my difficulty writing more versatile, interesting sentences - I have a tendency toward stylistic repetition. I wish I’d started even younger than I had.
Great piece. Funny how there's a Romantic movement on Substack when nothing is less Romantic than Substack. Imagine: "Cormac McCarthy struggled for years at magazine launch parties, getting rejected by It Girls like Madeline Cash until his newsletter, Grey Matters, was ranked #3 in literature."
Nice post, ARX, but I don't quite agree with your characterizations here. One can suffer plenty and still work a job; furthermore, the time compression involved in working a real job often forces brevity and economy in writing - no procrastination, one becomes better with one's time. For example, one relative of mine has responsibilities piled to the sky, and throwing another one on the pile is no big deal; another relative has almost no responsibilities, and getting this person to do the simplest thing is like climbing Mount Everest. I'll quote Librarian of Celaeno here:
“It is also important to bear in mind as well that Boccaccio, a writer of the highest caliber, had a day job. Like the Gen-Xers to come, he sold out and went into working world, taking up the family mantle of civic responsibility. He went on important missions for Florence and performed a number of government jobs, including welcoming Petrarch to the city, beginning a great and influential friendship. But he was never fully free to pursue his art, a fact true of nearly every artist then and up to the present. Consider that greats like Brunelleschi and Michelangelo were businessmen working on commissions; their time spent managing staff and studios must have far outweighed their time with brush and chisel. Even profoundly prolific writers like C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien were employed full-time as professors and had all the demands of family life (weirdly in Lewis’s case) as well. Let this be a lesson to those of us who would be artists if we had more time; we always have time to do the things that are important to us. The habits of industry and discipline mean as much as imagination and creativity.” From here: https://librarianofcelaeno.substack.com/p/the-retvrn-of-giovanni-boccaccio
Regarding the nature of suffering itself, yes, one can tell a writer or speaker who's suffered versus one who hasn't, and the difference is stark. I attended a talk last night where the speaker said all the right things, but said it in a smooth and confident way (like a Stephen Colbert) that betrayed a lack of suffering - and for that reason I didn't like the guy on first impression, and felt somatically a desire to stay away from discussion from him after.
(Comment cut off)
Regarding cooping up in order to grow, you may appreciate the teenage-aimed sci-fi book Singularity by William Sleator: https://www.amazon.com/Singularity-William-Sleator/dp/0140375988
Lastly, if you don't mind me saying so, I quite enjoyed your "Incel", but it seems to me that the only direction to go after exploring the ubiquitous nihilism of modern society is to think about and work out a solution to it that works for you. That, to me, is *much, much, muchhhhhhhhh* harder than simply writing another novel.
Except I disagree respectfully. Yes writing requires effort but I hate this implicit and very Protestant vibe that great art requires work which implies austerity and suffering. Writing requires work and effort which is linear, but it also requires richness of experience, which McCarthy did in spades too. Got your heart broken? That will enrich your craft. Been to a chemsex orgy? Ditto. Got fired? Been to jail? Moved country? Ask a girl out and she turns you down or doesn’t? Etc etc.
Writing isn’t this solipsistic exercise of you alone with a typewriter. It’s a communion between the world of experience and the world of thought. Live a goldfish in a bowl life, writing won’t be very good.
Men have this monastic tendency to monomania, but we are creatures of the senses and we have hearts that break easily. That imo is the essence of art and good writing.
I just wrote about exactly this on here (the ethics of falling).
Great articulation here - thanks for sharing
i have quit numerous comfortable jobs to pursue life (travelling, writing, more time with my kids, moving abroad, writing), first at 20, then 25, 28, 39, lastly at 50. regrets? of course, a few. but that in between time freedom, that “ah unemployed again!” rush from walking away from another job, is worth its weight in spiritual gold.
Great post. Honesty is always helpful and inspiring. For what it’s worth I’m 62 and I’m doing nights and weekends while trying to make enough money off of my normie business to pay for the things my family needs. I don’t feel like writing is a choice or an option. The Muse is a goddess, and she commands us. That’s how it feels. The project I’m working on is ridiculously long. I sometimes think no one else will like it. But I actually know two people will like it. That’s an existence proof. Since two people have seen what I’ve written so far, and and they are trustworthy, and they tell me they like it, that means that it’s possible for someone else to like it. That also means it’s possible there will be more than two! It’s very important to have at least that minimal level of support. It’s difficult to keep going sometimes, but I don’t know how to stop, and I don’t want to. I want to finish what I’ve started. And when I finish this, I have so many other things I want to write afterwards I will be dead before I finish it all. We’ll see if I can sustain my life and health long enough to do more.
Makes me feel better about the _four_ people who like my stories. ^_^
You are 2X what I've got! Crack open a beer, pal! You are killing it!
For the past year I've been trying to create some kind of ascetic life for myself. It's a pleasant exercise in living but so far it hasn't helped my writing.
You mention buying new clothes, eating at restaurants as the comforts you miss. I don't miss those things very much. The main problem for me is lack of community, lack of interaction & connection with people who have shared values. When you are living a life based around work & hobbies, it is easy to find people with shared values.
Since I started writing I've met many other amateur writers, including people with shared aesthetic values. But everyone I've met is pursuing a standard, white-collar career plus hobby lifestyle. And don't get me wrong, that's a good life, I'm just trying to do something different.
There have been many essays about the decline of bohemianism. Rising material expectations are part of it. But I tend to think bohemianism requires in-person community to sustain itself. Alternative culture has long since moved online, but the simulacrum of human interaction the internet provides turns out to be pretty thin gruel.
Is community the missing part of the equation that would make the suffering part more sustainable? Sounds like each time you tried it, you did it alone. But couldn't a community of people with similar values and lifestyle choices solve some of the problems, e.g., you create your own subculture in which you are actually high status for your dedication to your art...
Community is great. That’s one reason I love this website (and New York)!
There's a lot in here that I resonate with, but I will (good-naturedly) push back a bit here.
First, regarding the "great art requires great suffering" point -- I have gone back and forth on this, but ultimately land more on the camp of agreeing that it does. I myself have gone through the cycle of:
1) vulgar romanticization of the "tortured artist"
2) vulgar reaction against step 1, thinking it "problematic" and "fetishizing mental illness"
3) some sort of middle-ground synthesis of the two (admitting to yourself that Van Gogh cutting off his ear was badass, but maintaining ironic distance about it in conversation), and finally,
4) realizing that ultimately yeah, actually, you need to have been through some shit to have something interesting to say.
There are ostensible counter examples, like Proust, who on paper at least lived a spoiled, easy life. But could Dostoevsky write Brothers K without his several near-death experiences? I don't think so. A couple of caveats being here that first, it is NOT true that the more you suffer, the better your art is (the relationship is not linear, but probably more logarithmic), and secondly, it's worth calling out that your suffering need not be a result of easily narrativized external events, and is often just a result of a highly sensitive nervous system (some suffer in their minds more than in reality).
Related to this, and where my disagreement comes in -- suffering need not be financial. T.S. Eliot is a good example here - a man who held a steady job (likely acquired through nepotism) at a bank, but who was able to write The Wasteland, a poem of great pain and desolation, in part because of his refined philosophical and poetic sensibilities, and also in part because of a bad marriage. Here was a man with great financial security but also great unhappiness. You do not need to have your bills canceled to experience pain in life.
Regarding your thoughts on writing while working, and the frustrations of not being able to commit oneself fully -- I think that your grousings are very justified. And yet I do not think it is simply a matter of you being a petty-bourgeois coward (don't be so hard on yourself), but also just the way things are.
Living standards have increased, but also living expenses (in the Global North), and as a result, the required time and psychic/mental energy to maintain a middle-class life have increased in recent years. Kafka was able to work at almost part-time hours and fulfill his economic obligations. I doubt T.S. Eliot was pulling investment banking hours as well. The Lost Generation barely worked at all. These are perhaps some cherry-picked examples, but I think you can agree with the overall sentiment. Before, one could still be a petty-bourgeois coward, and still have the time to write. Nowadays, it feels more difficult.
And beyond work hours -- our minds are simply more occupied. First, let's get out of the way the clichés about the attention economy: we are distracted by our phones, Netflix, TikTok, etc. Ok, there's that, which is undoubtedly true.
Beyond this, and more interestingly, I'll also bring in Byung Chul Han's analysis of the "achievement subject". It is not simply that the rent is too damn high, that the kids can't stop with their damn phones... but also that after the shift to a post-Fordist, information economy, stable jobs enforced by external discipline gave way to greater flexibility (and instability) and along with this, a constant internal self-exploitation. Now, we are "entrepreneurs of the self", with an unending internal compulsion to achieve, to produce. Now, leisure time is subsumed by the logic of self-optimization (see: wellness trackers, apple watches, Andrew Huberman, etc). Now, our natural state is exhaustion and a constant feeling of burnout as well as the simultaneous guilt for not achieving in spite of it. Now, the deep concentration and boredom required for creativity is a radical counter-cultural act. And you still blame yourself for not having the time and energy to write a goddamn novel outside of work?
I'm not saying that it's impossible to write a great novel with a full-time job these days. But I am saying that I believe it's harder than ever before. Perhaps you DO need to drop it all and live in poverty to become the next Cormac McCarthy. But I sometimes wonder if even McCarthy could, in contemporary times, be able to get by on manual labor, or whatever he did, and then so easily commit himself to writing Blood Meridian. In all likelihood, he would have had to take on multiple jobs. And even assuming that he didn't, he would nevertheless have had to deal with the distractions, mental exhaustion, and pressure of modern life. Even maintaining a "poor" lifestyle these days requires more time and energy than before. Boomers had a very different economic experience - I don't think it's worth comparing their situation to ours.
Really, the ideal setup for a contemporary artist is 1) be born into a rich, but fucked up family that gives you the time, funds and suffering required 2) throw out your phone and 3) perhaps get deep into some sort of meditation practice that allows you to tune out the noise. For the rest of us, though, we will have to constantly battle the world to carve out the leisure time and silence necessary for our craft. I suppose what I'm ultimately saying is that -- you're not alone.
Good points all around - am very much a fan of Han’s book Psychopolitics and his model of the achievement subject is very resonant.
Appreciate the thoughtful comment!
Here's me: 49, wrote two novels in my 20s that were not published, wrote one in my 30s that I self-published at 39, countless odd jobs, journalist gigs, agency copywriter for over ten years, now unemployed thanks to the industry, the economy, my age, and AI (not necessarily in that order). And here's the upside: I'm am now writing full time. I've messed with a new book for the past 6 years and it was becoming even more fragmented than the last: you spend a 10 hour day writing stuff for other people, it's not easy to then write for yourself. I am now writing 8 hours a day - and don't get me wrong, sometimes you only get a page out of that! But I have NEVER in my near-half-century on this planet had this kind of uninteruppted time (forgot to mention the kids grew up and moved out!). And there is nothing like it. NOTHING. I don't think you can write the best novel you can write without this kind of time. I kind of wish I realized that 20 years ago. But I'm 20 years of writing the better writer now, so it's all gravy.
Here's the way I think about it, regarding the whole job thing: think of it as your own startup business. What is it, 25 percent of them fail in the first year? More? Think of it like that, you took this mega loan, you aren't even going to be paying yourself for the first two years anyway. You're writing every day: you're WORKING, you actually do have a job! You just aren't getting paid yet. In my case I'm just burning down savings to survive at the bare minimum while doing this. If it doesn't get published? Oh well I'm in the 25 percent that didn't make it, I'll get a another job (knocks on wood). If it works and I get a book deal? Hell yeah I just achieved the only dream I've ever had.
Do I suggest this course of action for everyone? If you can do it, you should. Your writing doesn't require your full attention, but your best writing does.
As a fellow middle-aged dude trying to balance making enough to support a family and trying to build a writing "career," this is extremely relatable. Hang in there, brother.
I relate to this so much. I used to watch Christopher Nolan's The Prestige and chide myself for not being more like Christian Bale's character, willing to orient my entire life around my art and materially suffer as a result of it.
But then I came to realize that the normie artist grind is its own type of struggle. A more comfortable struggle for sure, but a struggle nonetheless. Writing on nights and weekends after long hours of PMC nonsense is incredibly difficult and requires a discipline and strength of spirit others don't have. It is a lifestyle choice of its own kind, in the same vein as McCarthy choosing to live out of motel rooms.
A while back, I was laid off from a fantastic job, and so I began shooting out as many applications as possible. After a few months, I got one call back; custodian at local college. I was desperate and had to take it, so I tried to convince myself it’d be a good thing, and would give me more mental processing power to put into writing. It did, but I was so consistently miserable in other areas of life that it wasn’t worth it.
Great post. Another Catch-22-ish aspect of the demands of regular work vs writing is that the struggle to earn a living can be the kind of thing that informs and inspires your writing. When you give up the struggle, it's entirely likely you'll feel uninspired.
Another ARX post, another chance for me to quote Andrei Tarkovsky: "Modern man, however, does not want to make any sacrifice, even though true affirmation of self can only be expressed in sacrifice."
On a slightly less serious note, I think the idea you have to give up your job and all that isn't really true. If it were, covid would have produced a bunch of great novels, when people had all the time in the world. Personally I do much better with the structure of work and then writing in my free time. When I used to have the summers off, I accomplished nothing.
20-25 work hours a week + investing (lol) + writing full-time is where it’s at. I went the turbo-poverty route for a bit while writing my books, and it worked because I took no days off and had definite goals. It felt very liberating, but there always comes a point where the self-inflicted misery catches up to the misery of not being understood/noticed/etc., and you realize you can be just as productive while also not being a complete bum. (That realization definitely stings for a bit, though.) In fact, I actually like the tension that having a few other gigs going creates. I think the occasional frustration of one’s output actually leads to renewed resolve and a stronger output. Any time I’ve had a wide-open schedule to write, my productivity has dropped. I’d say, at least for me, it’s about balance, while always giving slight priority to your writing so that you can keep moving up the proverbial ladder of this industry.
Thank you for this, ARX. I felt its pains acutely.
I think the history of literature has shown us that great work is not only a function of hours spent and asceticism / discipline adhered to. There have been plenty of bangers written on lunch breaks, in slow seasons, in the interstices across many years. What is required more than time is *faith*: faith in your abilities as an artist, and faith in the goodness and necessity of the project at hand. E.g.: the best thing I've written took ten years and three totally different drafts while working various jobs, being severely ill, and being a student; it took me nine years to figure out the final sentence (lol, lmao even). On the one hand: obnoxious! On the other hand: for whom exactly should I have rushed? Regardless, it was my faith in the project that got the thing done.
"What do I need to make *this thing* great?" is a more productive question, in my experience, than "What do I need to make great things?" A fact that got hammered into my dumb recalcitrant brain when I began to fall down the chronic illness staircase: *We only ever have what's at hand.* Get something in front of you, shape it up, share it, and make peace. If you're lucky, you'll get to do that at least a handful of times before it's all over. I encourage you not to worry about the context for your art's production as much. It's quite easy to fall into the pit of comparison with the available biographies / hagiographies.
And please contextualize all of this advice with: My only "advantage" here is having gotten a lot of books out into the world, but ultimately I'm just a guy. Take or leave whatever's helpful & season to taste.
Love the idea of faith here.
I find myself frustrated by my difficulty writing more versatile, interesting sentences - I have a tendency toward stylistic repetition. I wish I’d started even younger than I had.