My Second Job

A couple of years ago I read an interview with one of my favorite writers, Justin Cronin, just as his most recent novel THE TWELVE was being released. When he was asked about his writing habits, his answer resonated with me so I wrote it down to remember it: “I’m a workmanlike writer. I show up every day and treat it like a job. The old rule that writing is like any other job, the first rule is that you must show up. I’m at the keyboard from 9 to 4 every day.”

As recent as a few months back when writing was just an obsessive hobby for me, it could come and go in waves. If I had a story that owned me, every available moment would be devoted to bringing it out. If I had a book to read or a game to play or some ridiculous time-sucking project related to school going on instead, the writing was something I could pause. I’d take care of the other thing knowing full well the story would be waiting for me where I’d left off.

When the people around me would first find out I was a writer, they’d react with the surprise you’d expect from someone discovering an amusing novelty. Eventually the natural question of whether or not I’d published anything would come up, and I’d always feel myself getting protectively defensive when it did. How was I supposed to justify the amount of time I spent on this hobby, or the decades I had invested in it without anything tangible to show for my efforts? I’d try to explain away the absence of published material by describing the process as successfully jumping through a series of increasingly smaller hoops while sparing the details: Actually writing a book is no small feat; accounting for rare exceptions, you really need an agent representing you to be taken seriously at a professional level; having an agent doesn’t get you published overnight, or even guarantee it; the number of rewrites and edits that happen along the way only end once the manuscript gets locked down as a book, which can take months or years after the initial deal is made. More often than not I’d just say how I kept working at it because I thought someday it would be nice to walk into a bookstore and see something I’d written sitting on the shelves. That would usually satisfy their curiosity.

During those times when the story I was working on demanded my attention, I’d feel a strange self-aware emotional mixture of feigned arrogance and subsequent guilt if I told someone I was busy writing or I had to work things around the writing time I had scheduled; I’d imagine their internal monologue responding with, “Oh, really.... You have to make time to WRITE, then, do you? Whatever you say, Artist Boy.” I know most people wouldn’t really think that way, but it was hard not to imagine it from beneath the landslide of rejected query letters and manuscript passes pouring from my inbox.

But everything changed this spring when my agent (a two-word phrase that still feels surreal to use) tapped me on the shoulder, and it didn’t take me long to start calling writing My Second Job. At first it was just my attempt at something clever to say, reminding people how excited I was to have an agent when it came up in conversation (or -- if we’re being honest -- if I saw an opportunity to wedge it into the conversation). But I'd think back to that Justin Cronin interview and the idea of a Second Job became more serious. This wasn’t just me playing around at the keyboard anymore, amusing myself by making up little stories and hoping I could convince my friends and family to indulge me and read them before I worked up the humility to throw myself at the mercy of the querying universe. This was next level stuff going on. This was someone in the industry putting faith in me and my work, and I desperately wanted to prove that faith was deserved.

Even with the demands of the school year, I still made time each day to work on edits and revisions. Progress was gradual when I could only get in an hour or two of work during early mornings or weeknights, with more concentrated work on weekends. And I won’t sugar coat it: Knowing I was working with a new level of accountability and the potential of reaching an actual audience someday was a bit intimidating at first. Eventually I got past that by telling myself enough times to put it out of my head and just keep doing the same things that got me where I was. Soon the effort became habit and I saw tangible progress being made, and the story began evolving into its newest and most drastically different (and fully realized) version. When that happened, the sense of excitement that would always capture me when everything clicked into place came back. And when it did, it came back huge.

I’m just shy of two weeks into my summer break now, and I’m already so embedded into my summertime writer life that when I see the names of people from school appear on my Facebook news feed, it literally feels like it’s been months since I’ve spoken to any of them. I have to force myself to maintain some kind of summer routine to make sure I still work out in the morning, and buy groceries, and keep the house clean, and pay bills, and all of those other things that during any other summer I would’ve addressed without a second thought. Right now life is most definitely first and foremost about the writing. One evening last week I was winding down in front of the TV, and it occurred to me I’d had a great day. I thought back over what happened to make me feel that way and realized I had spent something like nine hours in front of the computer working on edits and revisions and outlining. And I’d barely noticed it had been the whole day. Is every day like that? No. But it's great to have that kind of time for the days when I need it.

My writing life has been going on for a long, long time, but my writing career is still pretty new. I’m not in a position to show up every day and treat it like a job for the whole year, but I'm fortunate enough to get a couple of months of living like that. And as for being able to work like that rest of the year, and have writing go from being The Second Job to The Job? I’m not holding my breath. But if I had been asked in the summer of 2013 if I thought I’d be working with revision notes from my agent in the summer of 2014? I wouldn’t have been holding my breath back then, either. So who knows what the future has in store? Life happens the way it does.

But for now, break time's over, and I only have so much time before that day job starts intruding again. Time for me to get back to work.