Day job and the writing life, and unanticipated intersections

[pbray]

Anyone who's tried to balance a day job with writing knows how hard it can be. Sometimes the impact is easy to see--working a 14 hour day makes it difficult to find the energy to write at night.

Sometimes the impact is more subtle. When I first graduated from college and started working as a programmer, I stopped writing. But as I moved up the ladder to the point where I was managing programmers rather than getting to do the fun stuff myself, I once again discovered within me the desire to write.

It took me a while to make the connection. To realize that I was a creative person, and if I couldn't satisfy my creative urges in one venue, I'd turn to another.

Fast forward to last Friday. In my new assignment at MegaCorp, I've been asked to come up with the most efficient method for processing currency adjustments. After a couple of attempts, I created a script that produces the right answers, but it takes too long to run.

By coincidence, after the early morning writing session on Friday, I'd been stuck on a plot point. Normally this would mean that throughout the day my subconscious would be working on the plot point. But instead it had been preempted by the programming challenge. When I had the "Ah ha!" moment and reached for my pen, it was not to jot down ideas for the next scene, but rather a new idea for setting limits to the data blocks being calculated.

Even after I'd gone home, and immersed myself in the story once again, it was hard to get my brain back into writing mode. The creative idea generator wanted to solve the programming problem, and I had to tell myself that it was the weekend and I would not under any circumstances allow myself to power up my laptop to work on the day job.

Fortunately the opportunities for creative coding are few and far between, otherwise this balance would be even tougher than it is. But perhaps this explains why Einstein did his best work when he was employed as a patent clerk :-)

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

And Wallace Stevens as an insurance man...

I find my library work often crosses over very easily into writing and then back again. I run my library's book review blog, which is more or less a tool to promote items in our collection, and I wind up writing anywhere from 50-75% of the reviews, depending on the month. I'm actually working on an essay right now (for a scholarly publication) about why writing fiction is good for librarians. Sometimes it drains my creativity a bit, but just as often it cross-pollinates.

[jtglover.livejournal.com]

And Wallace Stevens as an insurance man...

I find my library work often crosses over very easily into writing and then back again. I run my library's book review blog, which is more or less a tool to promote items in our collection, and I wind up writing anywhere from 50-75% of the reviews, depending on the month. I'm actually working on an essay right now (for a scholarly publication) about why writing fiction is good for librarians. Sometimes it drains my creativity a bit, but just as often it cross-pollinates.

[pbray.livejournal.com]

Interesting. And it's true that the act of writing changes your perspective on books and what other writers have accomplished.

[jjschwabach.livejournal.com]

I found it very difficult to write when I was in grad school, because I was doing so much writing along the lines of:
"This is a 40-year-old male with a history of working a series of short-term, part-time jobs since the age of 23. He did not graduate from high school and has never earned a GED. He has diagnoses of Schizo-Affective Disorder and Borderline Mental Retardation..."

Unfortunately, that's basically what I do on my day job, too.

[pbray.livejournal.com]

Ouch. I can see where that would become mind-numbing.

I've heard some writers say that the best job for a fiction author is technical writing, and others say that it is the worst possible job. I suspect a lot of it has to do with your creativity style.

[jjschwabach.livejournal.com]

The odd thing is, it's not always. I mean, sometimes I get to solve real puzzles that people can't solve themselves.

[chichiri-no-da.livejournal.com]

It's interesting to me how very different people are. I actually find I have the exact opposite situation.

My writing waxes and wanes according to how overall stressed I am. When the muse completely dries up I know that means I'm reaching a certain critical mass and need to get my life stress dealt with before I can sit down and write again (or before I have a breakdown and cry for an hour on my wife's shoulder).

Being creative in other ways seems to help open the floodgates, like if I'm in creative mode my brain pokes at everything creative that's going on. Even if I'm working long hours, if I'm in a good mood and enjoying it I can still write even if all I have is an hour between when I get home and when I have to get to bed. On the other hand, if my job is really being tedious and frustrating, I tend to just get home and collapse and the last thing I want to do is write.

Since most of the creative stuff I do at my job involves writing (affidavits for a law office) you would think I would see the same thing happen as you do, but I've been tracking my writing for like a year and a half now and the relationship to stress levels has become exceedingly clear.

[pbray.livejournal.com]

Interesting indeed. Stress can be a tremendous writing killer--or it can be a motivator. It's that classic writing advice of "It all depends."

My critique partner is very similar to you in style, in that she's a multi-creative person, and can jumpstart her writing creativity by being creative in a different medium.

[sylvia-rachel.livejournal.com]

::nods sagely:: That all makes sense to me. For me another factor is plain old stress at the day job: certain kinds of stress feed my writing brain, others make me retreat into writing, and others again kill my creativity completely :P

[pbray.livejournal.com]

Exactly. I wish there was a way I could order up only the helpful kind of stress....

[jjschwabach.livejournal.com]

That would be nice.