Balancing Day Jobs and Daydreams

The dilemmas of a literary career

One of the most beloved poems of the past half-century is Mary Oliver’s ‘The Summer Day’, and its most famous lines are the final two: ‘tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?’ If your answer to that question is writing, then sadly it is not at all obvious as to what your actual job will be.

Writing is a career in the sense that it is something in which we should strive to improve at, respect the experience and knowledge of our elders, and work on over a lifetime. However, no competent careers adviser would tell a young person that writing a book is a sensible career move.

The University of Glasgow found that authors’ annual earnings in the UK dropped from an average £18,013 in 2006 to just over £7000 in 2022. Add to this a cost-of-living crisis, and it is apparent that almost all authors will have to do some decidedly unpoetic things to get by.

Mary Oliver

Why sticking to the day job is underrated

In ‘The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia’ by Samuel Johnson (1759), Princess Nekaya observes: “Nature sets her gifts on the right hand and on the left … as we approach one we recede from another.”

Professor John Carey’s “What Good Are the Arts” argues that Johnson’s book is one of the wisest ever written, for what it teaches us about sacrifice. Even with all our modern prosperity and technology, we still must go without good things to get what we want. You cannot be a mother goose surrounded by a happy brood and also have a high-flying career. You cannot build housing over land and still have it be countryside.

And sadly, for us writers, we cannot bleed onto the page every day and expect to hold down a high-status job. One of the most used adjectives in job advertisements is ‘passionate’. When looking for work I have been expected to be passionate about everything from car insurance to human resources to B2B marketing.

Passion is a finite resource. When people who are passionate about those things see the Sistine Chapel or hear Beethoven’s late string quartets, perhaps they are probably all out of awe.

A literary quote I have often cited in job interviews is one from Goethe: “Love can take you far, duty can take you further.” An understated sense of duty should in theory be enough to hold down a decent job.

Unfortunately, the working world does not belong to unassuming, quietly competent people. In ‘The Fifth Risk’, Michael Lewis outlined how in the early days of the Trump administration, the wholly unqualified new president gutted some vital government departments. This was because those workplaces were staffed by people who were very good at what they did but very bad at selling themselves.

Moreover, when ensconced in a paid job, it is easy to sink into the work and lose a sense of self. In ‘A Life of One’s Own’, a ground-breaking piece of self-examination published in 1934, Marion Milner wrote ‘For what is really easy, as I found, is to blind one’s eyes to what one really likes, to drift into accepting one’s wants from other people’.

Marion Milner, author of ‘A Life of One’s Own’

Although it may be self-regarding and even mildly psychopathic to think this way, having a day-job is actually good for one’s literary ambitions. Agatha Christie developed her knowledge of poisoning and pharmaceuticals by volunteering at a hospital during World War 1. And Charles Dickens could never have written so harrowingly or so convincingly about the lives of factory workers if he had not been one himself.

Balancing Day-jobs and Daydreams

What makes a good creative writer? Well, first one needs to be creative. Other important qualities include insight, both psychological and social. Defiance of cliché is another important one.

As an undergraduate from 2002-2005, I took modules in creative writing at every opportunity. As a Master’s degree candidate in 2005/06 in the now defunct Creative Writing and Personal Development Master’s at Sussex University, every time I returned home to the Cheshire suburbs I was struck by one unpleasant reality – the more I lived my life by the principles of creativity, insight, and defiance of cliché the more of an outsider I would become. How could I function in society without abandoning the things I learned in libraries?

The answer seems to be in striking a balance. Literary luminaries of the past century seem to have been those who had day jobs at which they were competent while channelling their intellectual and creative energies into their writing. Philip Larkin was a librarian, James Joyce an English teacher, and Toni Morrison was an educator for years before becoming a published author.

One of the many books that enchanted me during the MA at Sussex University was ‘A Short History of Myth’ by Karen Armstrong. She cites the unprecedented problems that the world was facing and how these problems were seemingly more intractable than those facing previous generations.

Armstrong’s radical conclusion is that the novel as a form might be what is needed to bring ‘fresh insight into this lost and damaged world.’ And to improve the world, one first has to be part of it.