Loving or Not Loving Your Job

picture by Peg Ihinger

One of the perennial questions every professional writer gets is, “How do you find time to write?”

One of the common answers to that question is, “You don’t find time. You make time. People can always make time for what they love to do.” Followed by a few examples of extreme time-finding, like my friend who taught herself to type while breast-feeding because it was the only time she sat down all day. And that’s all true…

…except when it isn’t.

See, about 90% of the people who ask that question are like the would-be writer who, when questioned about “having literally no time to write,” revealed that he watched 6 hours of TV every night, and absolutely, positively, could not under any circumstances give up watching any of the programs he was following. (I responded by shrugging and saying, “Obviously, you love TV more than you love writing.”)

But every so often, I run across one of the other 10%. After this long I have gotten a lot better at spotting them and, I hope, telling them the thing they need to hear.

My first encounter with someone like this was back in the very earliest part of my career, at an SF convention when an editor took about fifteen of the publisher’s newly published writers out for a mass dinner. It was a terrific dinner, good wine, great food, even greater conversation. I happened to be sitting just down from the editor when the waiter came with the check.

The writer between me and the editor started to pull out her wallet to contribute her part of the meal. The editor, of course, waved her away, saying, “No, no, the company is paying for this. It’s tax deductible.” As the waiter took off with the bill, the writer said, “But we’ve had such a good time! It feels wrong to get the company to pay for it, or deduct it on taxes.”

The editor looked at the writer, shook her head, and said gently, “[writername], neither the company nor the IRS cares that we enjoy our jobs. They only care that we’re doing them.”

That comment stuck with me. About seven years later, I ran into another new writer who had just published her first novel, a light “funny fantasy.” I’d read and enjoyed it, and I mentioned that to her. She sighed and went off on a long speech about how she really couldn’t justify spending all that time and effort on something with no redeeming social value, and if she was going to “waste time” writing, then shouldn’t she at least be writing nonfiction articles about important issues?

I don’t know that I convinced her that writing light fantasy was not a waste of her (or my) time..; I was much too taken aback by the gradual realization that this writer, who clearly loved writing, fantasy, and humor (which is really difficult for a lot of writers), considered all of them a “waste of time” because they were fun and easy for her, and neither “socially useful” nor clearly addressing specific issues she felt strongly about.

Since then, I’ve run into a surprising number of people who have similar opinions. They have a lot of difficulty “finding time” to write because they love it, because they don’t recognize that it’s okay to love and enjoy your job (or your hobby). Many of them seem to think that the mere fact that they find a task unpleasant means that it’s more useful, valuable, or important than the things they like doing. Sometimes, they “can’t justify” delegating these tasks to anyone else (because they’re unpleasant), even if the other person doesn’t actually dislike the task.

This mindset results in the things they love being corralled into smaller and smaller chunks of time as the person tries harder and harder to be “productive” and “useful” by doing all their unpleasant jobs before they allow themselves to have fun. And while there are certainly a fair number of truly necessary unpleasant tasks in one’s life that must be done at some point, something is wrong if there’s no time or energy left for anything else.

About half the people I’ve met who have this kind of difficulty are dealing with an obvious crisis going on—a family member with a terminal illness, the unexpected birth of triplets, the destruction of their home/business by fire or flood or hurricane. For them, I ask whether writing is their way of escaping things (in which case, it’s probably going to help if they squeeze in at least a little of it, because it will help them recharge and cope with the crisis), or whether writing is going to require more mental and emotional energy than they have available right now (in which case, it’s okay to temporarily suspend it until things settle down). Neither choice has to be “justified” beyond the realization that it’s the best way for them to cope (and by the way, how about you ask someone to bring over a casserole so that you at least don’t have to cook for a couple of nights?).

The other half of these folks are much more difficult to deal with, because for them, it’s not a crisis that’s driven them away from their writing. They’ve bought into the idea that everything they do has to be productive/useful/helpful in some clear and measurable way—that loving writing isn’t enough to justify doing it; that doing something that makes them (and, eventually, other people) happy for an hour or two isn’t enough, either; that they “should” be doing something they hate, but that “makes a difference” (i.e., one they can measure). They feel guilty about enjoying their job.

I don’t know that I’ve ever successfully persuaded one of these folks to change their mind, but I live in hope that I’ve at least gotten a few to think about what they’re doing.