Is it a Job or is it a Career? Megan Rix / Ruth Symes

Have you seen comedian Chris Rock's stand-up routine on You Tube about whether you have a job or a career? The link is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HG9paM_3QRM  or you can put Chris Rock job or career into Google and it comes up straight away.

I hadn't seen it before until my husband told me about it one evening when he arrived home feeling down about his job. It's very funny (but be warned Chris Rock does love swearing!)

Basically what he says is if you have a career there's never enough time in the day to get all the work that you want to do done. I'm always wanting more hours to write in (especially at the moment - time for another weekend away at a hotel to just write I think!). But if you have a job rather than a career you spend the day looking at the clock/watch and counting down the hours until it's time to go home. In a career you want more time to work and in a job you want less.

It certain rang true with me and a lot of people I know. But not always in as clear-cut way as Chris Rock put it. When I was working I loved my job and knew it was worthwhile - the only problem was that I longed desperately to write and when I wrote I felt like I was complete and when I did anything else I was just killing time or worse wasting it when I could have been writing.

Then I had the BIG talk with myself about what you really want to do with your life, supposing you only had one year left how would you spend it, what would you be truly disappointed never to have done...

I knew that it was wise to stay working until I could support myself and so I went down to part-time and then temporary work. Only the less hours I spent at work the more hours I could write and the more hours I got to write the more I wanted to do more. :)

Now happily I write full-time under the names of Ruth Symes and Megan Rix although I don't think I write as many words a day as I did when I was still working full-time and the words would come bursting out because I'd held them in for so long. I always wish I could write more... no picture books for ages ... and I used to write for TV...

What's it like for you?

Ruth's latest book is published by Piccadilly

Megan Rix' latest book is published by Puffin

Keep Your Day Job - Heather Dyer

copyright Fountain_Head

“If only I had more time,” we often say, “I’d be able to finish my novel.” We feel that if only we could live the ideal ‘writer’s life’ (alone in an isolated cottage overlooking the sea, perhaps) we could write our masterpiece. But how many writers actually live this sort of life? And is it really helpful?
 
The truth is that not many writers can be productive for an eight-hour day. Personally, I can only manage two hours at most before I have to do some admin or run an errand. I might go back to my book later in the day, but I can’t write all day, every day. In fact, I have come to believe that pushing on before your work is ready can actually be counterproductive. It can mean taking your story down the wrong track, or not going deep enough.

Having a day job (or other responsibilities) means we have to do our writing in short bursts when we get the chance. But this has some advantages.

1. Being committed to non-writing activities frees up our unconscious, so that it can find solutions while our thinking brains are otherwise engaged. Trying to think our way out of a plot problem is rarely successful. Answers seem to come in the form of images or ideas that occur to us while we’re in the middle of doing something else

2. Something else that a day job can do for our writing is to help us take it less seriously. Having a day job means that writing can remain a labour of love; something that you do for fun, as opposed to something that you do because you have to. As Frank Cottrell Boyce says: "real creativity should feel like a game, not a career..."

3. A day job also means that we have to interact with the sort of people we might never otherwise meet – and since it is primarily through our interactions with others that we develop and mature, a day job can often provide our richest life experience and some of our best material.

Carol Lloyd, in her insightful book Creating a Life Worth Living, classifies day jobs into ‘No Contest’ jobs, ‘Wellspring’ jobs and ‘Big Tent’ jobs. Wellspring jobs (like copywriting or journalism) use the same skills you use in your own writing. These jobs may improve your technique, but can if too demanding they can sap your creativity, leaving none left for your own work. The No Contest job (working in a bookshop or gardening, for example) typically don’t require you to invest too much mental energy, but may not pay very well. Big Tent jobs involve working in the industry (like teaching creative writing or working in publishing) and can be useful for networking.

So, although we may dream about living the ‘writer’s life’, we mustn’t lose sight of the fact that the first requirement of being a writer is to live fully. The writer who cuts themselves off from the rest of the world may be limiting the source of their inspiration. A day job or family responsibilities can give us a sense of belonging and make us feel part of the world. And when you stop thinking about your writing, you allow unconscious to get to work on it. Most importantly a day job leaves our writing where it’s meant to be: somewhere we can escape to – a place where we can play. Perhaps having to fit our writing in around a day job isn’t such a bad thing after all?

A Tale of Two Activities - Clémentine Beauvais

If you're reading this post in the morning of the day it's come out, send me a positive brain wave and cross your fingers for me: I'm currently shaking fretting panicking calmly getting ready for a job interview in a university somewhere in the UK...

So I'm taking this blog post as an opportunity to reflect on the difficulties and joys of having another job in addition to writing, one that you really don't want to give up on. Most people tend to assume that I'm secretly dreaming of being a full-time writer. I often hear, 'Are you keeping up the academic side just for the money?'

That's easily answered in MS Paint:

To most people, if you have an 'artistic' side, anything else you do must surely be 'paying' for your artistic activity. If you're not giving up the 'day job', it probably means the artistic one doesn't earn you anything, or not enough. 

Even my academic colleagues have somehow internalised the notion that I would 'prefer' to write children's books as a full-time job; that it's what I really want to do. We were talking at lunch about what we'd do if we won the lottery (yes, students: that's the kind of thing your lecturers and tutors talk about at lunch), and several colleagues said that they'd quit their job immediately. I said I certainly wouldn't stop working - I like my research and teaching, and I'd get bored. The immediate response was, 'But you could spend all the time you want on writing your children's books!'

Frankly, if I really wanted to spend all my time writing children's books... well, I would take the jump and do it. And if I needed a job to subsidise this activity, I probably wouldn't opt for one that requires hours of teaching, reading, essay-marking, meeting-going, networking, jargon-deciphering, revise-and-resubmitting, email-sending at two in the morning, in a crazy incertain job market, with no weekends to speak of, holidays that are in fact conferences, and the absolute impossibility to stick to regular hours.

Well then, are you keeping up the academic job as a safety net, 'just in case the writing doesn't work out?'

(The notion of academia as a 'safety net' is just... I mean, I wish, but...)

If the writing didn't 'work out', it would probably be in part because of the other job. Writing success isn't some esoteric thing that does or doesn't work out according to the unpredictable movements of the stars - the more you work on it, the more likely it is to 'work out'. You might never be J.K. Rowling, but you can get very respectable sales by being strategic, working hard, meeting children and promoting your books. This is more difficult when you've got another job.

So of course, having another job isn't ideal for your publishers, agents and publicists. There is definitely faint pressure to 'quit the day job' and be a full-time author. School visits and festivals often happen during the week. Even if you can make some of it, you can't be one of these writers who do school visits all the time. Therefore your books might not sell as well, and you might not get as high an advance next time, or even asked for another book.

Gone are the days when it was acceptable to write your books in your 'free time', and to decide that this year, you'll only publish one, or none. It doesn't work like that in the UK (to a degree, it still does in France). The publish or perish rule applies here like it does in academia; being a part-time writer will always put you at a disadvantage.

Implicitly, there is pressure also from other authors and illustrators who are full time. There's a very legitimate worry that writers like me contribute to making our activity appear unprofessional, amateurish, dilettantish, something you do 'when you've got the time', or if a partner is subsidising your indulgent bohemian bourgeois lifestyle. I entirely understand this concern, and it does bother me that I contribute to this vision. Authors and illustrators should absolutely be in a position to live - and to live well - thanks to their work. Saying that your writing brings you 'pocket money' or is 'a fun thing on the side' is quite insulting to the rest of the community.

But choosing not to choose is perhaps the only authentic option when you have the luxury of having two activities that bring you different rewards, different challenges and different joys. And many people, I'm sure, secretly want to do not just one thing, but several. Recently a student asked me for career advice (I know, terrifying). She said she was split, because she wanted to be a film maker, but 'not just': she was also considering being a researcher in psychology, or perhaps a teacher, or even a consultant. Why can't we do several things at the same time, when we have so many interests?

I agreed of course, but said the reasonable thing: doing several jobs, especially an artistic one and another 'official' one, is difficult. She said 'Well, you manage it!' I told her 'managing' was a strong word - she doesn't see the moments when I'm marking essays all evening before updating my PowerPoint for a school visit the next day, or playing Google-Calendar-Tetris with deadlines on fiction-writing and article submissions and conference abstracts and book edits.

Since I was making it sound like my life was only slightly less sinister than that of the Baudelaire orphans, she blurted out: 'But you're happy, aren't you?'. I had to admit that I am...

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Clementine Beauvais writes children's books in French and English. She blogs here about children's literature and academia and is on Twitter @blueclementine.