Negotiating the Grind Without Selling Out
With my career comes new challenges
Except for a few darlings of the publishing industry and/or trust fund babies, being a writer really means spending most of your week not writing. It’s ironic but true. Whether you slog away at a regional university teaching 4-5 classes a semester or working as I do in finance, you will spend the vast majority of your time thinking about writing but not writing nearly as much as you’d like to. It’s almost a universal rule of the working writer. After all, your income as a professor (or a financial planner in my case) doesn’t come from the time you spend writing. It comes from your time teaching, doing university and department service, reading MFA applications, mentoring students, reading theses, & critiquing manuscripts if you’re a professor. Your books help you get tenure, but you’re not actually paid for your books but your teaching responsibilities. In finance, I get paid to help my clients from the alpha to the omega. My job is to complete them. When they win, I win. When they win, the company wins. And I get to use my teaching ability and my love of research, learning, & analysis to make a small but profound difference in people’s lives. Not only that, but I get to use my empathy, my organizational and communication skills, and my rapport with my clients to help them dream about the future and also protect themselves from the future. My career as an author is just part of my secret, alternate identity. Sometimes, I feel like I have a hybrid brain or I’m a walking contradition. Most of the time, I feel like I’m just a balanced human being who happens to write music, speak multiple foreign languages, work in finance, and publish books.
But I know that I will not have time during the work week to write since I have classic business work hours from 8-5. Intellectually, I detest this schedule as much as I detest the idea of this schedule. But physiologically, my body is thriving. I go to bed and wake up either at the exact time during the work week or within an hour of that schedule on the weekend. I’ve never slept better. I may not sleep enough, but my body has found a delightful cadence after decades of bad sleep with inconsistent and divergent sleep schedules fueled by writing deadlines, merit reviews, story critiques, & getting lost in the flow. One evening: 4 AM. The next: 1 AM. Then: 2:45 AM. It was out of control. Now, it’s shamefully boring. It’s heinously corporate. But it works beautifully for my body in ways that are absolutely an insult to my imagination:
Go to bed at 10-10:30 PM
Wake up at 6 AM
Being a literary fiction/nonfiction writer who works in finance has its own unique charms and disadvantages. But I feel like I’ve learned a few things along the way and they keep me sane whenever I start idealizing my old life as an underpaid, overworked, stressed-out academic professional. For one thing, the weekends are sacred now. Before, my weekdays always bled into my weekends. I often worked seven days a week teaching and there was no boundary separating work from play. Ever. I could be reading in bed, notice an email from a freaked out student on my phone, and even if I waited until the next day to respond, I KNEW IT WAS THERE IN MY INBOX WAITING FOR ME.
Now, that boundary has barbed-wire fencing and guard dogs and a watch tower. And I like it that way. I can afford not to think about my job if I want to on the weekend. I can literally get away from my job now. Something I was never able to do before because academia is totalizing by nature.
For another thing, my biggest agony before—namely, money—isn’t an issue anymore simply because you get paid more when you work in the market than when you work outside the market as academia must do. As a professor, I made decent money but it was sometimes a little depressing compared to how many degrees I had and also how much my own students started making after they graduated from college. If you want to get humbled instantly, just look up the average salary of anything your former students are doing and you’ll realize that they are making more money than you are (or were) as their professor. Since higher education is both overpriced but also culturally undervalued, most professors stay middle-class until their final years teaching.
Another thing: I was constantly worried that my retirement/pension plan would never be enough in academia whether working as a lecturer or as an assistant professor on the tenure track. And if there’s one thing that gets in the way of the creative process, it’s poverty. No matter how we, as artists, might try to glorify it. Defined contribution plans for lecturers, even in the unionized UC system where I taught for four years, are partially clipped by your middling, compressed salary. Now, I’m not worried about that simply because Fidelity has great benefits and I’m also contributing 15%-20% of my salary to my retirement now, which hurts but is also necessary in my circumstance. This is something I would never and could never do before. I still have an incredibly long way to go before I’ve made up for the many years I didn’t plan for my retirement and the many years I was unable or unwilling to think about the future concretely. And yet, when I’m working on a manuscript or revising a short story or reading a novel of literary fiction or a poetry collection now, I can do so completely immersed without my thoughts creeping back to the smoke in the distance. I’m more present now because I’ve finally started taking care of my future for once. Something I should have been doing before but chose not to for a lot of terrible, half-though-out reasons. Part of this is also my desire to take care of LB in my old-age and another part is not wanting to be a burden to her (or anyone else) financially because I didn’t save enough for my own retirement. I refuse to be one of those piece of shit authors who only thinks of themselves and who relies on their community to always bail their asses out.
I know it’s very gauche to talk about money and incredibly unsexy to think about retirement as an indie literary non/fiction writer, but the older I get, the more convinced I am that we must have these difficult conversations especially since we—the artists, the intellectuals, the literati, & the scholars—tend to devalue, pardon the oxymoron, the value of money and the peace of mind that a good retirement plan gives us as writers, artists, public intellectuals, creators, & cultural critics. Instead of romanticizing poverty, malnutrition, resource scarcity, & uncertainty, though, I choose stability now and that’s precisely because I’ve lived on the other side of the train tracks. I know poverty and malnutrition. I know what it’s like to live on $100 a week. I know what it’s like to stuff your pockets with free hors d’oeuvres at the Yale reception table. I know what it’s like to take a student loan out just to pay for a bag of Trader Joe’s groceries. I know the empty space of an unfurnished apartment. And I know the feeling of sleeping on a futon without a blanket. I never want to experience that again. I hope that no one else does either. And to that end, I will make choices that give me the peace of mind I need to create the kind of books I want (you) to read now and in the future. That’s the promise I’ve made to myself. And now the world.