Chapter 142: Day Jobs, Part II
So how to support yourself as a writer, when there are so many new ways to be published but fewer ways to get paid?
Turns out there are ways that may not necessarily be apparent, but which exist – both as actual places and ways to work, and as inspiration for finding ways to support a writing life.
That is the takeaway from the results of the survey we’ve conducted over the past couple of weeks. My thanks to those who participated, especially as you will see below, in the descriptions of what an ideal day job would be, or in some cases already is.
As to how writers are now supporting themselves:
Freelancer
50%
Job in unrelated field
44%
Full time journalist
22%
I am stuck by the number of people who freelance or work in fields unrelated to writing. I find the number encouraging, even as the number of jobs in newspapers and magazines shrink. It reinforces my belief that those who need to write will find a way to do it.
The way they always have.
Even more revealing are the responses to the question of the ideal day job. Best to let the replies speak for themselves.
Here is a sampling:
-Fire fighter, rescue paramedic
-I have a part-time day job that I consider to be pretty ideal overall (even though I've been doing it for 5 years and some times tire of it): I work for an NGO that works with networks of local people to research human rights violations in hard-to-reach communities. My role is to make sense of the findings and provide them to partner organisations such as HRW or the UN. So it's very close to working as an editor and, importantly, it pays my bills.
-Nonprofit dedicated to broader research and writing in my journalistic specialty, or a nonprofit investigative outlet.
-Where I get to write. Newsletter, newspaper, magazine.
-I think I HAD my ideal day job at the start of my career. I was working at an alt-weekly where my only responsibility was to write 10 or so long-form stories a year (5000 words or so), plus a few more 1000-word news stories. I got edited! I could talk to other people about what I was working on! I could experiment with style and form! Unfortunately, it paid $32K a year, which, even in St. Louis, was not enough to live on without sneaking in freelance assignments (officially forbidden) and teaching. So I guess my ideal job would be kind of like that, but with a decent salary? Insurance would be nice, too. And maybe a reporting trip or two every year? (I'm not particular — I was pleased to go to places like Springfield, MO.) Does a job like that exist anywhere anymore?
-I already have an ideal day job. I work in the commercial team of one of the leading Australian publications. The only part that I don't like about my job is calling customers to sell ads.
-I've almost got it now--half-time webmaster for a private college. Only thing missing is benefits.
-Designing/curating window displays for floral shops and various boutiques.
-Journalist and feature writer
-Honestly, I loved being a record store clerk. But that didn’t pay much either. I guess I’m reasonably satisfied being a marketing communications professional for a college. At least the gig is full of storytelling. But I don’t get free records or concert tickets!
-Project-based consulting.
-Writer in residence at a museum or some other kind of public art and design venue.
-Psychotherapist
-I'm creating it. My training is in acting, and this is the way actors survive: make your own work. I'm creating a nonprofit. Yeah that's how you get rich lol. But it could actually pay the bills.
-Magazine staff writer
-Journalist but at a different (non finance B2B) publication
-For me, the most important variable is time. My "day jobs," outside a newsroom, have ranged from ghostwriter to a gas heiress turned empowerment guru, to sous chef in a Laotian restaurant, and many stops on the NGO, international organization, and Think Tank route. None have been ideal, and to an extent, all have been ideal for as long as they afforded me time for the writing I cared about. That has seldom lasted, either through a contract's end or, most often, because that fine balance that allowed the writing faded as demands naturally increased. Maintaining your main source of income on the margins of your personal (writing) priorities is not easy, even if you do not have a family or a mortgage. The best balance I've found –and it is unstable– is to have various clients for whom I write, copy edit, and translate (and who pay in a strong currency; never take that for granted). They are your clients, not your bosses. Location and schedule are flexible, and it's in and out for the project's duration. This may force you to postpone your more ambitious narrative projects for days or weeks at a time, but with some luck, what comes after allows you to work on those articles no one would commission, pitch the unlikely stories only you care about, and pay for that reporting trip yourself. But you have to be honest about the moment the balance shifts, the point when the day job goes from the means to an end to meaning you end up not writing.
-My ideal day job would be as a full-time journalist with the freedom to write the kind of stories I'm passionate about, with job security, support and guidance from editors. Instead I am forced to freelance taking on piecemeal shifts and commissions, which on the plus side allows me freedom and flexibility but doesn't give me much financial security or the opportunity to progress.
-I think working at an NGO, non-profit or think tank. Good hours and benefits, a great mission, and inspiration for story ideas.
A couple of weeks ago a recent grad came by to talk about her ongoing and dispiriting job search. She’d been submitting her resume, cover letter and samples of her work into the maw that is the submission portal, knowing from painful experience that she might never hear from an actual person.
I offered her what is by now familiar advice to former students: make a list of every place where you might want to work; find the name of an editor two or three slots down from the top person; email said editor and say that while you know that nothing might be available perhaps you can stop in for ten minutes to introduce yourself and ask for advice because most everyone likes to offer advice because it makes them feel smart.
Follow up. Send links to anything you write that you are proud of. Play the long game. Your hustle will remind people of the way they want to remember themselves when they were starting out and hungry.
But now I see that this advice is too limited. Better, I suggested, to expand the search and begin asking herself: who values my skills? I can write and I can report. Most people cannot do this, certainly not as well as I can. I can meet a deadline. I can deliver clean copy. I find stuff out. These are valued skills, and not only in a newsroom.
Make a spreadsheet, I told her, and not only so you can keep track of every email, follow up email, and wait-a-suitable-interval follow up call. That spreadsheet allows you to see how widely you’ve ranged, how much you’ve pushed beyond the conventional paths. The spreadsheet represents your job right now and you want to see it in full, because it will remind you how hard you are working and how much you have done. Filling it in means slowing down the thinking – and by slowing things down you filter out at least some of the ambient noise of anxiety and despair.
Then I added one more thing: write. Have a story you are working on. It does not matter if it appears on your Medium page, or your newly launched newsletter. Write because when someone asks you what you are up to, you want to be able to say, I’m working on a story about such and such.
Good for the career. But more importantly, good for the soul.
Writers are lucky in that unlike other creative people our needs are limited: paper, pencil, pen, laptop.
Imagination and drive. Yes, drive. Sitzfleisch. Which translated from German (or Yiddish; the term exists in both) literally means, “sitting flesh.”
Sit. Write. Get up to stretch. Then sit back down. That, in a nutshell, is the life.
See it that way, and the hours spent at a day job somehow race by quickly, because you cannot wait to get back to the story that is yours and yours alone.
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Nothing good ever came from writers punishing themselves. We know writing is hard. We’re here to show that it doesn’t have to be torture. Writerland, The Delacorte Review Newsletter comes out every week.
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We’ll be off next week. Back on March 29th.