Sometime back, I read the story of a wanna be poet that was working to survive and in his spare time he would write poetry. His poems caught the attention of the right people and he gained a certain degree of fame. He started giving talks and doing all sorts of appearances.
All these, sadly, were not paid engagements. The poet started to neglect his day job and in the end he was fired. Without a job he could not live in the place where he had found his fame, so he had to go back to his old town.
Pam-pam- pam. Cautionary tale alert!
I found this interesting and it made me think about the large numbers of us that just dream Only if I could write all day! and not work- work for a living.
I am thinking that this kind of longing can, after a certain degree, hurt us, as it leads to dissatisfaction with the life we have. And until we build another, this is the only one we can master and enjoy.
I remember reading about Stephen King, how he wrote while working in the laundry room of a hotel. Or Haruki Murakami writing every night after returning from a demanding bar job. Or, as I was writing the other day about Diane Thomas, who wrote Romancing the Stone while waitressing. And this kind of stories abounds.
Yeah, we also have the stories like that of Harper Lee, who was gifted a year’s salary so she can take time to write, but these are mostly the exception than the rule.
It is difficult to write when you have a full time job and are juggling all the responsibilities of being a human being. It is not hopeless though, and although it might make you slower or it might be more difficult for you, as long as you keep at it, the satisfaction and joy of creating will nevertheless be there.
Maybe we will not all become JK Rowling or Stephen King, but we can all still write in our own, discrete way and enjoy the craft.
I find it that often, when you are too demanding with yourself, you can cause yourself to stress so much that you get blocked and cannot create anymore. I think we should just enjoy the process and the creating and as the song says… Que sera, sera.
Do what you can, with what you have and always take care of yourself in the process.
If you need to work, work and make the most of it. Set time aside for writing, if this is important for you. Make sure to listen to your body when it asks for rest or understanding. Keep it simple!
Be compassionate and good to yourself. If you are ok, the writing will be ok.
Good stuff, Alina. Speaking as a writer who gets to write whatever I want whenever I want and pay the bills with what I write, it wasn't easy to get there, and I know very well writing while doing something I disliked, something I had to do to survive, like Stephen King and Dianne Thomas. I came to a point in Hollywood when I first got here where I was facing homelessness. But a German rock'n'roller I knew let me move into the garage in his back yard in Old Hollywood. It had a dirt floor from the 20s, and I slept in a sleeping bag on an army cot. I could either go get a job at McDonalds or find a way to write myself out of the garage. I chose the latter. I borrowed a long orange extension cord and ran it across the yard to the house and plugged in my typewriter. Over the next month I wrote what I later titled "In the Year of the Monkey," a Vietnam script based on all the "magic minutes" - the stories you don't forget - told me by fellow vets in the GI antiwar movement, done as "Moby Dick in Vietnam". I showed it to a director I knew who showed it to the only Vietnam combat veteran movie producer in Hollywood. Two weeks later I was sitting at the end of a very long table at Twentieth Century Fox with the head of production at the other end, lined with development executives to either side, who were saying "We want to make your movie!" Two weeks later I was walking Sunset Boulevard with a check from them for $50,000, trying to find a bank that would let me set up an account with only one piece of photo ID. (I found one( I never looked back to that garage, but I will always remember it. Like Stephen King who remembers where he wrote "Carrie" and Dianne, who remembered the bar where she came up with the idea for "Romancing the Stone," and Sylvester Stallone, who remembers turning down $350,000 for the first "Rocky" while being four months in arrears for rent because they wouldn't let him star in the movie. My script sank four movie studios and was last listed in 1990 by American Film as:"the best unproduced Vietnam script in Hollywood", but it got me out of the garage.
My writing mentor, the late Wendell Mayes, who wrote "The Spirit of St Louis," "The Hunters," "The Enemy Below,." "Anatomy of a Murder" (for which he received his first Oscar nomination), many others, and won his Oscar for writing "The Poseidon Adventure" (that's Hollywood, folks!) once told me what he had learned from 40 years in Hollywood:
You are only willing to succeed to the degree you are willing to fail.
That's true for any creative artist, and when I have run across the people I knew "back in the day" who never made it as screenwriters, the difference between them and me is what I did when I ended up in that garage as an alternative to homelessness.