Living the dream?

As some of you may be aware, the last year has involved a lot of expensive home repairs for me, mostly involving having to replace major appliances (furnace, water heater, air conditioner, computer, sewer line) plus minor repairs to several others. During one of my meetings with an eager young a/c salesman, the subject of how I make my living came up.

“I’m a writer,” I said, having expected the question because it always comes up when buying major expensive things on a payment plan. (I had the file of yes-I-can-pay-for-it information all set up, as this was the third major breakdown this year [see above].)

His eyes got very big. “You make your living that way?”

I sighed quietly and just said, “Yes.”

“Wow! That’s … that’s… You’re living the dream! Wow! What’s it like to be living the dream?” (Yes, he said it twice.)

That was not the reaction I expected. Especially from a guy who was trying to sell me a fancy new air conditioner that was going to cost me several thousand dollars. It took me longer than it should have to come up with the answer, even though I’ve given it before to similar questions under other circumstances. “It’s my job.”

This is a thing that ninety percent of people who want to be writers don’t think of, don’t bother to ask about if they do think of it, and (in my experience) often dislike being told: the “dream” most of them are chasing is a fantasy with very little connection to reality. Ask them what they picture as a typical writer’s life, and they talk about passion, about immersion in different characters, about the flexibility of a schedule the writer controls. Sometimes, they talk about the romantic image of the writer living in a minimalist (and very artistic) garret, sleeping til noon, writing in coffee shops in golden afternoon sunlight (in a cosmopolitan city) or perhaps simply people-watching (to “observe characters”), and then having a late night at a literary bar with their writer friends, tossing ideas around over drinks that somehow never result in a morning-after hangover.

Nowhere in this dream are any considerations of, oh, having to share that minimalistic garret with four roommates in order to make rent. And there is absolutely no recognition that if one wants to make a living as a writer, things like food and minimalist-artsy furniture still have to be paid for, or that everything one owns will eventually wear out, break, or get used up, and fixing or replacing things will have to be paid for. Usually, this means having to work behind the counter in that coffee shop, instead of people-watching from one of the tables.

When people run up against these realities, the first thing they eliminate is nearly always their actual writing time. Because the dream is about passion and flexible time and the romantic vision of the writer’s life, not about actually, you know, writing stuff. And “keeping the dream alive” by spending one’s free time reading at the park or hanging out with literary friends in the bar or blowing an entire weekend at a convention is a lot more fun than sitting home cranking out words when one doesn’t feel like it, especially if one isn’t at all certain they’ll sell.

I’m not “living a dream.” I’m living a life. It’s quite a good one, but it isn’t Instagram-perfect. Stuff breaks; accidents happen; things go wrong. Emergencies occur, ranging from a leaking pump that spreads half-an-inch of water over the furnace room floor to a two-years-and-counting global pandemic.

And that’s the other thing about “living the dream”—dreams are perfect fantasies. They’d be nice if they happened, but real live ordinary people don’t really expect to have them happen to them. And those expectations are correct. Dreams and fantasies don’t just happen to people who are sitting around waiting for their fantasy life to materialize out of thin air.

Nobody gave me a permission slip to go be a writer. It took me five years to get my first novel written and another two to sell it, during which time I was working entry-level jobs and taking grad school classes and generally having a starving-twenties normal life. I had to get the writing done anyway. I wrote my first novel because I had to; because the story wouldn’t leave me alone; because writing it down was the only way of getting the story in my head finished and organized in some sensible manner so it would stay out of my head.

Not in order to live some dream.