The Benefits of Being a Part-Time Writer

1 in 20 writers are able to support themselves by writing. I got that number from Stephen King’s On Writing, written by a man who, of course, is among that profitable five percent. But even the great Stephen King was once a part-time writer. He wrote three novels before he hit the jackpot with Carrie. During that time, he was a high school English teacher in Maine. He taught all day, then came home and wrote in the laundry room of his family’s trailer. In recounting his time as a part-time writer, King writes that “by most Friday afternoons I felt as if I’d spent the week with jumper cables clamped to my brain.”  

When most folks conceive of writers, they think of them as someone who clocks into the writing desk like the rest of us clock into work. But like most idealistic conceptions, reality is different. For the majority of writers, words don’t pay the bills. Let’s say you spend a couple years working on a novel and end up making $50,000 (which is way above average). If you added up all the hours spent writing, researching, revising, and promoting, you’re probably making less than minimum wage. Strictly from a financial perspective, you’re better off bagging groceries.

Like it or not, if you’re a writer who wants to have a family and/or not live in a gutter, you’re probably going to require another job. And as someone who’s spent the past decade finding spare writing time in between work and family obligations, I can say from experience that it’s not as hard as it sounds. Honestly, it’s kind of amazing what you can produce on an hour’s worth of writing per day. On a day-by-day basis it feels slow, but then you get to the end of a year and think, “Holy shit, I wrote two stories and eight novel chapters in my spare time.” There is power in constant effort, accumulated bit by bit. As Andy Dufresne said, when asked how he tunneled his way out of Shawshank Prison with only a tiny pick-axe: “Pressure and time.”

There are many successful writers who can attest to the power of constant pressure applied over a long period of time, who managed to create meaningful work while never devoting 100% of their efforts to writing. Anthony Trollope, Victorian-era writer of doorstop-sized novels, had a long career as a civil servant in the British government. He wrote for two hours every day before work. Or take Martin Clark, author of brilliant, southern-fried legal thrillers. Until recently, he was a circuit court judge in Virginia (he just retired). But for years, while on the bench, he published a book every four or five years. And then there’s legendary Canadian novelist Robertson Davies, who produced a shelf-full of novels and plays over the course of his career, and yet was never a full-time author. As he put it, “For the greater part of my life, the luxury of devoting the best hours of the day to my writing has been denied me. I have no one to blame but myself. I have always had a job.”

And maybe having a job isn’t the worst thing in the world. It certainly takes the pressure off your writing. Being a part-time writer means you work at your own pace. If your novel needs a fourth or fifth revision, you have the luxury to do that because rent money is coming from somewhere else. Not only that, there’s something to be said for taking four or five years to finish a book, instead of one or two. The story gets that much more time to bounce around in your head, like wine marinating in a cask. If you plow through in a year, maybe it comes out half-baked. It’s possible to have too much of a good thing, even writing time. To quote Davies again, “I am sure we can all think of writers who write far too much; their talent has become diseased, hypertrophied because of continual gross and indecent solicitude of the imagination.” Like any commodity, writing time becomes valuable when it’s scarce. I’m hyper-focused when I sit down to my desk at 5:30 am, because I know that hour is all I’m going to get.

Another benefit of writing part-time is that it saves you from spending all day in your head.  Writing fiction is a highly subjective endeavor; you are the god of the world you create, which perhaps isn’t the healthiest sphere to inhabit on a full-time basis. Writers are already too cerebral. Is it any wonder that as a species we are known for being depressed? Having a job is the cure for this. As writer (and motorcycle mechanic) Matthew Crawford says, work keeps you in touch with “the world outside your head.” If you never bump into the objective realities of that world, if your entire existence is subjective and internal, it leads to neuroses.

The writer can’t be a fragile, precious soul, sheltered from life in a writing studio. If you want to write about the world in a convincing way, you have to be out in it. Moby Dick wouldn’t have happened if not for Melville’s rough-and-tumble years sailing around the globe. Or take Japanese literary phenom Haruki Murakami. Before he began writing worldwide bestsellers, he owned a jazz club in Tokyo. In his memoir, he describes spending the decade after college working 12-hours a day to keep the place going. Of that time, he writes, “By sticking my nose into all sorts of places, I acquired the practical skills I needed to live. Without those ten tough years I don’t think I would have written novels, and even if I’d tried I wouldn’t have been able to.”

I’ll close as I opened, with Stephen King. In On Writing, he describes a common lament he hears from people who would love to write if only they have the time, people whose literary ambitions are dashed by constant interruptions. They fantasize about writer’s retreats – maybe one day when they retire – when they can finally focus on their writing. But this isn’t a real obstacle. If you want to write, do it now. The obstacles might actually help.

As King puts it, “In truth, I’ve found that any day’s routine interruptions and distractions don’t much hurt a work in progress and may actually help it in some ways. It is, after all, the grit that seeps into an oyster’s shell that makes the pearl, not pearl-making seminars with other oysters.”

So, keep your job, your spot as PTA treasurer, and your couple-times-a-week running habit. Do all those things and keep putting your butt in the chair, day after day, whether it’s for one hour, two hours, or fifteen minutes. Fight for your writing time while still honoring the rest of your responsibilities.

Your writing will benefit not in spite of the struggle, but because of it.