Writing with a Day Job

Back when you were working a FULL TIME JOB (in finance?) what was your schedule like? Did you have to burn a lot of midnight oil, and come to work exhausted the next day? How did it feel and what tips might you have for those of us that are doing the same thing? (Bruce Wayne during the day and Batman at night).

It is exactly thirty years come March that I left my FULL TIME JOB (yes, in finance – I was a corporate financial analyst for what is now Target Corporation), so my memories are of a distinctly different time and place. No cell phones, let alone smartphones; no Internet; hardly any email, certainly no social media; no flash drives. That’s the first thing you need to know, because the upshot of all this was that it was impossible to use my corporate desktop terminal to write on, because the software was completely incompatible with my home computer, even after I switched from the Apple II+ to a PC, and even if they’d been compatible, there was no convenient, mostly-unnoticeable way to get the information from one machine to the other.

The second thing you need to know is that I am not a night owl. Even then, I found it hard to stay up past 10 p.m., and almost impossible to be coherent after 11. Once in a great while, I was on a hot enough streak to keep going beyond my usual falling-into-bed time, but that was rare – like, happening twice a year rare. If that. I am also not a lark, except by comparison to my current full-time-writer friends who sleep until ten or eleven every morning. If I am getting up at 6 a.m., it is because that’s when I have to get up in order to shower, dress, eat, and get over to wherever I have to be (at the job, when I had a day job; at the gym, now that I don’t have a day job but do have a walking partner with a day job). Getting up half an hour earlier to write is right out, then and now.

What my writing schedule looked like back when therefore involved splitting the process into two parts. During the day, I had a 15-minute “coffee break” in the morning, another in the afternoon, and an hour for lunch. I spent those times (and the relatively few slow periods when there really wasn’t anything to do for half an hour) scribbling the next few paragraphs on legal pads in a nearly-illegible abbreviated semi-shorthand. When I started getting asked to go out to lunch with too many people, my writing time suffered significantly. Eventually, Pamela Dean (who worked half a block down the street, and who had the same problem with writing time and lunches) started having lunch together once a week, during which we sat and wrote instead of talking to each other, and that worked remarkably well for both of us.

When I got home from work, I would take the day’s production and type it onto the computer. Usually I did this after dinner, on the same day I’d written the stuff (if I waited two or three days, I often could not decipher my own abbreviations). As I typed, I changed, expanded, and revised. Even with the additions and changes, it seldom took as long to type in as it did to write the stuff in the first place (I was a reasonably fast typist). When I got to the end of the day’s production-so-far, I’d keep going until I started to slow down; at that point, I’d copy the last paragraph or so (by hand until I got a printer) onto the top of the legal pad to take to work for the following day. Then I’d go do laundry or dishes or whatever.

The long writing sessions I had at the computer were usually on weekends. I had enough life maintenance and social engagements that I didn’t usually manage to get a long session in on both Saturday and Sunday – sometimes it was one day, sometimes the other. I did not work to a specific writing schedule (every day at 6 a.m. or 9 or noon or whatever). I didn’t even work to a schedule on weekends when my time was theoretically mine to arrange all day. Something always came up. I could usually get in at least one two-hour session sometime during the weekend; it was a matter of always being on the lookout for time I could use to write in, and taking immediate advantage of it whenever it came up.

Working this way, I generally got between half a page and three to four manuscript pages written on weekdays – I think it averaged out at a little over one manuscript page per day. The down side was that I did not spend much time socializing with my fellow workers or hunting out the sort of extra projects one needs to do in order to advance in a corporate environment, which means that I was most definitely not on a fast track to promotion.

I did not regularly come to work exhausted from writing into the wee small hours. Quite apart from the not-being-a-night-owl thing, I was being paid to do a job to the best of my ability, and I’d have felt wrong if I’d deliberately fudged on my responsibilities like that day after day. I might have felt differently if my day job had been something like waiting tables that didn’t require a lot of mental acuity. There were, of course, days when I stayed up too late and came in tired and not entirely up to snuff, but most of those were due to having had a late-night gaming session, rather than writing. I find it a lot easier to stay up late if there’s more stimulation than that provided by letters appearing on a screen and the noise of a keyboard.

As for advice, my first piece is that whether you write at your workplace during lunch hour or not, you do not tell anyone there that you have ambitions as a fiction writer. People have all sorts of weird ideas about how writers work and what they are like. Once they get over the excitement of knowing a Real! Live! Writer!, they are extremely likely to assume that you will stop pulling your weight at the job, or that they will be appearing as recognizable characters in your next novel (complete with embarrassing personal information). This doesn’t always happen, but in my experience it has happened with a frequency depressing enough to advise very strongly that you don’t mention your writing at your day job, even if you are quite, quite certain that your boss would love the idea and never, ever penalize you for it.

The second piece of advice is, remember what’s paying the bills. The day job comes first, until you have enough of an “IQ” fund (i.e., enough in the bank that you could say “I Quit” without worrying about paying the bills for six months, minimum) that you don’t actually need it any more. Past that, it’s an ethical decision. My feeling is that the writing comes on your time, not out of time during which you are supposed to be doing stuff for your employer. If you can do the job and still write (say, you are on the midnight-to-8-a.m. shift on the 24-hour help line that nobody ever calls at 4 a.m., and really, all you have to do is sit there and listen), fine…as long as you do the job. Again, it’s an ethical decision, and some people draw their lines differently.

Actual writing advice – well, that depends in part on your process. Take a look at the kinds of stuff you usually do and/or that you have to do for this story. Usually, that involves stuff like research, notes/prewriting, outlining, first draft, keyboarding (if you don’t do your first draft on the computer), revising/editing/proofreading. Think about which of these things you can easily do on a coffee break or lunch hour, and which you can’t. Think about when you need to do them (research, for instance, usually comes early in the process of developing a particular story; revising, editing, and proofreading can’t happen until you have at least a draft to revise), and how you do them. If your prewriting involves handwritten sticky notes plastered all over a door and your research involves reading a book on Roman aqueducts, you may want to do the first at home and the second on your lunch hour.

Next, think about when you have time that is yours. At the office, you have lunch time and coffee breaks. If you have the sort of office job where everybody clears out at five, but your bus doesn’t come until 5:30, you can grab another fifteen or twenty minutes of writing time by stretching your day a little. (You can do this at the other end of the day if you are a lark, too.) You may be able to snag some time after dinner, or after the kids go to bed (if you have kids). Or you may only have kid-free home time during certain TV shows, or on alternate weekends when you trade babysitting with someone in the same boat.

Then think about which parts of your process – most especially writing drafts – would fit well in which bits of the time you have. Also think about where you can salvage time you are spending on things that aren’t terribly important, like checking your email every five minutes, reading Twitter or Facebook, playing computer games, watching TV, etc.

Finally, commit to writing during some of that time. Yes, you have laundry and dishes to do, phone calls you could make on your lunch hour, etc. Life maintenance will eat your writing time if you let it, and you are the only person who can keep it from doing so. Yes, you have colleagues to chat with during coffee breaks, and you really, really want to see what they think of the latest episode of “The Walking Dead.” Socializing will eat your writing time if you let it, and you are the only person who can keep it from doing so. If you want to write, you have to write. If you “don’t have time,” you are spending your time doing something else that you are treating as more important. Sometimes it is more important … which can mean anything from a family crisis to the minutia of raising a family to, well, anything that is more important to you than writing. If that last includes discussing yesterday’s news at the water cooler on your coffee break or always joining your friends for “happy hour” after work on Fridays, or never missing an episode of your favorite TV series, that’s your choice and you are entitled to make it. Nobody gets more than 24 hours per day, 7 days per week. Everybody else has exactly the same number of minutes, hours, and days as you do; those of us who are writing are simply spending them differently.