Earbrass, LTD: Writers in search of reassignment?*
January 26, 2010 | 41 Comments
“First, try to be something, anything, else.” That’s the famous first line of Lorrie Moore’s “How to Become a Writer,” and it’s funny because it’s true. Many writers do consider another path initially.
Roberto Bolaño, for instance, wanted to be a spy, Kate Christensen a rock star, Joan Didion an actress. Chris Adrian went to medical school, and the seminary. Herman Melville was a sailor and Larry Brown a fireman. Faulkner did guv’ment work.
Jonathan Lethem once worked as a bookseller; if he weren’t a writer, he says he’d probably choose to be a film historian or curator.
Lately there’ve been layoffs at my day job. I seem to have escaped for now, but have been mulling over what to do if I get the axe. (I mean, apart from writing the things I want to write. I’ll always do that; I’ve always wanted to be a writer. But I also have to eat.)
Top of the list is is Grasso & Neutron, the private eye firm Dana and I keep saying we’re going to start up. (Laugh while you can, monkey boy. We know what you did last night.)
Apparently this is a common writers’ fantasy. Also, espionage. (See, e.g., Edward Gorey’s Mr. Earbrass, above, and the writer as detective.)
I’d probably be reasonably happy doing genealogical research, which is sort of the same thing as detective work, except everyone is dead. I have a feeling there’s not a big demand for this kind of service in a recession, though.
How about you? If you write, did you go right into it? If not, what’d you do first, or want to do? And if writing what you love doesn’t pay the bills, what does (up to and including “layoff lit“)?
I’m genuinely curious and opening up comments. Anecdotes about favorite authors are welcome.
* Courtesy Ms. Carrie Frye.
Comments
41 Responses to “Earbrass, LTD: Writers in search of reassignment?*”
January 26th, 2010 @ 2:08 pm
Teach! I’m thinking most writers now have MFAs, those handy little diplomas that qualify you to teach 18-90-year-olds how to craft a story and maybe a novel. It’s also what I wanted to do when I was little. I have copies of books I graded. It’s close to being an editor, I suppose. I never wanted to be a detective, although now that I think about it, I once had great email hacking skills which I used on many an ex. I guess my fantasy job would involve travel. There was a time when I wanted to work for the State department and use my Arabic skills, but I probably would have been gassed for treason.
January 26th, 2010 @ 2:43 pm
Private investigator, all the way.
January 26th, 2010 @ 2:47 pm
In real life I am a dictionary editor, sort of another kind of writer, though that work is about as stable as anything else in publishing, meaning it’s not.
I have come to realize that I should have been a plumber. The work will always be there, and I suspect you end up privy to a lot more household secrets than you can use in your fiction.
January 26th, 2010 @ 3:05 pm
An astronomer or a geologist.
January 26th, 2010 @ 3:11 pm
I spent 6 months once conditioning and training myself to become a police officer. I put on weight and worked out like a maniac. Then I remembered that cops got shot, and suddenly I didn’t like the idea so much. And as soon as I stopped working out, my body reverted to its normal writer’s body: small and asthmatic.
January 26th, 2010 @ 3:21 pm
Zora Neale Hurston was an example of a writer that stopped and just took a “plainclothes” job teaching. Her students just thought that she was some weird lady with crazy hats.
January 26th, 2010 @ 3:22 pm
I’m a heating equipment tech on the design and implementation side. I spend just about as much time at a desk as I do in the field. The work is steady, interesting and even fun. We’re given plenty of room to innovate in our designs and I enjoy coming up with economical ways to get different pieces of equipment to communicate with each other. I get lots of time to myself without someone standing over my shoulder, free travel around the country and we’re not a service company so no overtime. It can get dirty and/or wet sometimes. That part of the job is unavoidable and obviously not for everyone.
I journaled for many years and wrote poetry before realizing I wanted to write fiction. Also served in the Navy too. Met many interesting people and saw many places I wouldn’t have because of that. I think those experiences made me want to write more than anything. The sameness and uniqueness of people is something I find infinitely fascinating, indescribable and undefinable.
Love the blog and the tweets. I’m a huge Highsmith fan and appreciate the links you dig up.
January 26th, 2010 @ 3:28 pm
I *always* wanted to write, so I became a journalist because journalists tend to have full-time jobs and novelists do not. (This was in 2002. Things may have changed.)
But I found I was writing ridiculous stories about cats stuck in trees, and was working ridiculous hours for ridiculous wages, and I never had time to work on creative writing, and I was very unhappy.
Then I married an engineer and quit everything to move halfway across the world with him, and the only thing more intimidating than not having time to write is quitting your job to write full time.
When we moved back to the States in 2007 I couldn’t find a job so I decided to go back to school and get a second degree in creative writing. Since then I’ve been freelancing, which is fun because I can pitch basically whatever I want, and I’ve been writing a lot more creative stuff too. But, I’m poor, and totally dependent on my husband. I’ve traded one for of servitude for another in order to be freer elsewhere, and I’ve never been happier.
January 26th, 2010 @ 3:57 pm
I really want to direct.
(wait for laughter)
I really loved being an audio engineer/sound designer/music producer, and sometimes regret that I didn’t stick with my first job at a big commercial music house and become a jingle writer.
I still dream of running an ice cream stand somewhere in the Caribbean. Either that or be an assassin for the Illuminati.
January 26th, 2010 @ 4:15 pm
I was a publishing assistant, then a hs English teacher, now a hs librarian. Out of the 3 jobs, librarian is the best job for me &, I suspect, for aspiring writers. I get to work with kids, books & information/research without taking any grading home, which allows me to write.
If I couldn’t be a librarian I’d do some kind of research, which is part of my librarian training. Or private investigator. I’m nosy and I get things done. Though I think that would make it hard to write.
January 26th, 2010 @ 5:00 pm
I would echo on librarianship. I was persuaded to the profession while still working on the MFA. After a few years of adjuncting and editing I got around to acting on the advice.
It’s a decent wage and as tenure-track faculty I have better than average job security. Somehow I managed to convince this place to make me the English librarian, which means I teach information literacy in the lit courses and order all the fiction, poetry, and criticism. I’m still surrounded by literature but I engage with it in a completely different way. That’s probably for the best. I hated editing.
January 26th, 2010 @ 5:19 pm
Appellate public defender (good for getting stories), and competitive ballroom dancer. I love Neil’s idea of becoming a plumber though!
January 26th, 2010 @ 5:45 pm
Another librarian here. After toiling for years in unrewarding jobs, I decided it was time to get that Masters. I didn’t want to get an MFA since I didn’t particularly want to teach, and I’d thought about getting an MLIS after graduating from university many moons ago. Thousands of dollars in debt later, I’m fabulously happy with my job. The stress I felt every morning going to work has evaporated, which has translated into a much more productive writing life.
January 26th, 2010 @ 5:55 pm
I’m in IT in the UK and have been for many years, but before that I was a guitarist and lived in Hollywood until my money ran out and i had to go back to England.
It’s strange how things turn out.
January 26th, 2010 @ 6:09 pm
I worked as an illustrator while writing my book, and A Book of Ages is full of tales of writers doing other things before they made it. Evelyn Waugh was an illustrator; Updike wanted to be one too. Trollope and Faulkner were postmasters; Faulkner was no good at it. (He read people’s magazines.) Raymond Chandler was an oil executive. Ginsberg wrote ads for Ipana toothpaste. Harper Lee was a travel agent; one Christmas her friends gave her six months off to write a book. Kate DiCamillo was a bookseller (not far from here.) Somerset Maugham, Ian Fleming, Graham Greene and Wm F Buckley were spies. No surprise. Orwell, famously, a policeman in Burma. T. S. Eliot a publisher. Whitman a nurse. Wallace Stevens remained an insurance man all his life. I’m still an illustrator, as you’ll see in next month’s issue of the Believer and the current McSweeney’s. I love doing both.
January 26th, 2010 @ 6:46 pm
I can’t help thinking, Lorrie Moore published Self Help when she was 26. So, she probably wrote that line when she was… 23, 24?
Still, it is good advice.
I found book binding to be a good combination with writing– I was handling books all day long, but only as objects, & working with my hands left my mind free to think about whatever I was writing.
January 26th, 2010 @ 6:50 pm
My alternate occupations are all, if you can believe, less practical and remunerative than being a novelist. Would love to be a pro cyclist (hah! 20 years too late) or a pro chess player (hah! 20 IQ points too dumb). Like others, there’s always the draw of teaching but I suspect I lack the necessary tact for the gig …
Didn’t Edward P. Jones have some sort of anonymous desk gig for like 20 years? Can you imagine the reaction of the co-workers the morning he won the Pulitzer?
January 26th, 2010 @ 6:55 pm
We could always try prostitution. Although some would say that is what we are doing at our day jobs.
January 26th, 2010 @ 8:40 pm
When I’m not writing what I love, I’m writing what I, well, don’t love. I write passages for an educational company. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a bad day gig–pays the bills. Although sometimes I think I should have kept it simple and stuck with painting houses. How I use to love the smell of thinners in the morning.
January 26th, 2010 @ 8:42 pm
After 18 years of schoolin’, I went to work making $5600/yr at the welfare dept. Once a client fell asleep on my desk while I reached for a form. Another of my clients used to throw fits while lying on her back on the floor. This thing was so common that the ambulance drivers used to ask her which hospital she preferred on each occasion. Then I moved to cubicle hell at NY State Dept. of Social Services. My first position was working for a little Mussolini-type woman who did not allow excessive talking in the office. For real. It was all downhill from there.
Dream gigs: mafioso underling with a modest seaside villa in Sicily, Mediterranean travel guide or yacht captain for the obscenely wealthy, apartment or condo mogel for the outrageously wealthy in Manhattan, owner of a non-hipster non-geeky wine bar in lower Manhattan, winemaker in southern Italy, tenor sax player during the heyday on 52nd St or in Kansas City
January 27th, 2010 @ 1:08 am
Okay! I will answer your questions. Prior to writing, the best job I ever had was making a TV show for kids. Right now I teach fiction writing at a university though I do not have an MFA of my own. Dream job: musician. Everybody knows that music is better than writing, it just is.
January 27th, 2010 @ 6:11 am
I’ve come to writing late – very late, past 50. Before that I grew kids and heritage tomatoes!
OK, seriously, I’m one of the oddballs who reckons it’s best to leave writing careers to the younger folk, at least those who can manage it, so I write courtesy of a supportive husband, occasional freelance translating, and a very frugal lifestyle. And I like it that way: independence is money in the bank.
January 27th, 2010 @ 8:51 am
Fiction-for-a-living has been the goal since I was in my teens. I’m not there yet: I teach subjects completely unrelated to writing (computer science, of all things) at a university, and write technical documentation, which pays surprisingly well.
Not as interesting a career-amble as Terry Pratchett’s: public relations officer for a nuclear power plant, just before Three Mile Island…
January 27th, 2010 @ 10:07 am
I wanted to be an astronaut. Or a librarian. I worked three years at a library and I still miss it. I’d do it again. As for the astronaut thing, I’m waiting for those cheap space flights.
January 27th, 2010 @ 10:30 am
Jobs I’ve had? retail sales in: women’s clothes, kites, needlepoint, candy; plumbing dispatcher; tutor; blue print reprographics sales manager; university admissions evaluator; department secretary; manager of a painting company; library shelf-stacker; parenting site blogger; editor; creativity coach; teacher, not necessarily in that order. Whatever it takes. My favorite thing to talk about and write about (besides fiction) is the creative process, so I suppose if I could order up a job, it would be to teach seminars or offer workshops on that- and hopefully someday I will do more of that. AFTER I finish the novel in progress!
January 27th, 2010 @ 10:44 am
As a kid I wanted to be a marine biologist. (I’ve long thought you can divide tween girls’ dreams into two distinct categories: those who want ride ponies and those who want to swim with dolphins.)
Right out of undergrad I had to choose between pursuing writing and archaeology. If I couldn’t write, I think I’d be pretty happy to go back to digging. Excavation, in many ways, is not at all unlike the writing process: Agonizing, back-breaking, patience-testing, laborious, with often very little promise of true discovery.
January 27th, 2010 @ 11:06 am
I too have always thought I’d make a great detective/private investigator. I’m just realizing now how common that is among writers. I suppose it makes sense… we are observant and over-analytical of every little movement, gesture, character, etc.
So basically what I think should happen is all the writers of the world unite to form a detective agency. Ok? Great, see you there.
January 27th, 2010 @ 12:53 pm
My day, income-related employment involves being a therapist. I was in a part-time private practice, but now I work 40 hours a week, doing counseling for an agency. Since starting full time, I have had a lot less time for writing and a lot more ideas for writing projects. (None work related, of course; the work has to be confidential.)
How long can one defer a dream?
January 27th, 2010 @ 2:32 pm
[...] book, and it will be on display this summer at the British Library. . . . Maud Newton has opened a comments thread to ask writers what they did before they wrote, or while they wrote, or what they would like to do if they [...]
January 27th, 2010 @ 2:39 pm
All things vie for our attention or some sort of action. The job is and always will be writing—negotiating the time to write, in our minds, as professional observers or spies, and then on the page, as writers. Paying the bills is just a minor inconvenience or a tragedy that could be worthy of a good story someday.
I’ve always wanted to be unemployed. I’m always too damn responsible though. I keep getting job-jobs. And now I have a secure (?) job in the restaurant business, when does that happen? The biz is good theater, plenty of drama and comedy. And always a threat to a writer’s time. That said, the muse likes it rough, it’s a fan of S&M, it prefers to be slapped by the hand that feeds it, if you will. The muse is at its best when pressed against the wall and….
As Anthony Checkoff once said: Medicine is my girl and literature is a threesome with my girl and my best friend. When I get tired of one, I spend time with both of them.
As for my next job, I will be learning how to be less responsible, less reliable, less practical and more impulsive—a Vagabond. However, the recession is not a good time to be a Vagabond, I’ll have to wait until after so I can do it in style, perhaps in France, ala Cortazar.
January 27th, 2010 @ 4:29 pm
I’ve been a plumber for 35 years. Unclogging a toilet does not give you great insight into somebody’s personality. Collecting the bill does. I’m now a general contractor but still end up under people’s sinks.
One of my early novels back in 1976 identified me as a plumber on the bookjacket. A french critic (Jean Vigneaux) wrote a lengthy critique praising the fact that in America even a plumber could write a novel whereas in France only academics seemed to get published.
So, yeah, you could be a plumber. After 35 years of it (and nine books published), still nobody in America will have heard of you, but in France you might be a hero.
January 27th, 2010 @ 7:34 pm
War photographer. (Though I don’t even own a camera, and have never been to or in a war, though I’ve written about it.)
January 28th, 2010 @ 1:53 pm
I’ve been an engineer since before I started writing. Now I work on networks for a hospital but I got started with that while working at a reservation that produced nuclear weapons materials. Before that, I worked on modifications to a nuclear power plant – it had been 2 weeks from startup at one point so I got to run around an essentially complete, non-radioactive power plant, but I hated what I was paid to do.
My writing about the nuclear stuff kinda freaked out Sheila K. when she was my teacher.
January 28th, 2010 @ 3:48 pm
Growing up, I really wanted to be a chef, like my grandpa Injun Joe Thompson. I’m from Newport, RI, a resort town where all school boys became dish dogs and line cooks on the weekends, and the girls waited tables–until closing time, when sleeping with each other was added to the side work. And I actually loved it, too. But I probably worked in 20 restaurants before realizing that I really wanted to be a writer. In Newport, most restaurants close for the winter, which is a season that easily lends itself to poetry…or drinking…or both.
Ironically, it was when I became a vegan that I decided not to chef–something about becoming a “niche cook” bothered me. Now I may no longer be vegan, but I’m not much of a cook. By day I write about STDs, breastfeeding, environmental health, and why you shouldn’t shake your baby–for any reason; by night: Russian lit and a novel. Still, there’s some poetic note from my old line of work that keeps stirring my cook’s muse:
The Prep List Fugue
by K. Kinsella
– 50lbs onions
– Chicken stock
– 5 gals aioli
– 3 gals of bernaise
– clean fryolators
January 28th, 2010 @ 9:07 pm
I am a book editor who occasionally writes, and the only other thing I could imagine doing with my life is to work as a prosecutor, preferably in anti-racketeering activities . This was a notion that hit me while watching “Goodfellas” for the first time, and it’s not an odd idea at all. My father was a New York City policeman and plenty of guys from my Brooklyn high school went into law enforcement, most conspicuously Ed McDonald, the federal prosecutor who nailed Henry Hill and got him to sing. It would be very satisfying work to put these violent bastards away.
January 28th, 2010 @ 9:30 pm
I used to be a professional comic. I also worked in film for years. I taught creative writing to the children in Cirque du Soleil. I was even a bad actress for a while, but I was never a DJ. Oh, to be a DJ!
January 29th, 2010 @ 1:04 pm
I’ve never been one for the job-lock, so I pretty much threw myself into a range of things–factory worker in a mayonnaise plant; construction worker (very minor stuff like sanding and interior painting and assistant dry-walling and putting up office cubicles and building-demolition [not the exploding kind], because really I’m not that handy); once had a job putting in alarm-wiring for a gated community complex and completely fucked that up–by the end of the sixth day I’d embroiled myself in all the webbing and I just about had to be carved out–ever see that film SPIDER? yeah, I was just like that poor nut; worked delivering pizzas which was horrible because most people are just so damn skimpy with their tips, but I got my revenge on my last day when I upended every box I delivered so the cheese would end up top-spattered and congealed; worked as the world’s most incompetent literary agent’s assistant–I lost correspondence, tossed away checks, opened a window and accidentally let fly a set of contracts, didn’t bother to answer the phone, typoed all to hell just about every letter I hammered out, got lost taking lunches, always arrived incredibly late, but really that was a year in my life where I got incredibly unbelievably smashed just about every day, and I still feel terrible about that even though it was more than a decade ago; read my way through a job in a university library; worked as a laborer and dockman for a chemical facility, a bad-ass job, dirty as hell, gave me muscles and incredible confidence but took away all the time I needed to write. And now? If it weren’t for my girlfriend, I’d be shaking a paper cup by the Holland Tunnel, trying to cadge hot dogs from the vendor on the corner.
I would have liked to have become a homicide detective, but that’s just fantasy; in reality, I’m far too incompetent for everyday work. Since I’m being completely honest. And honesty is the writer’s bread and butter isn’t it?
Isn’t it?
January 30th, 2010 @ 4:56 pm
I wanted to respond to the Lorrie Moore quote: I think anyone that is creative will try writing ultimately because what does any good dancer’s resume read like? “Studied Jazz and Tap and moved on to Ballet at age 8″. How ’bout a Cellist? “Entered the Conservatoire age 13 and played Scarlatti’s ‘Tentacle Cantata’ for my examinations”. No one can really say they got serious about language before anyone else, hey, we’ve all been tooling around with language since Noam Chomsky gave us “Innate Grammatical Competence” during our terrible twos, so we’ve all got the jump on building with words.Someone you might say had a jump on us was Lorrie Moore, winning Seventeen magazine’s short story contest at the age of 19. 20 years later she wrote the short story collection “Birds of America”, quite a few masterpieces in there, but ever try reading her novels? “Anagrams”? “Who Will Run the Frog Hospital”? Dear readers, Who WILL read, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? Heaven Forfend! The myth of precocity debunked.
January 31st, 2010 @ 5:35 am
I think you are onto something (and yet off) concerning the genealogical research. It seems several of my friends who became unemployed this year were compelled to complete their family trees! So, it would seem to be a boon industry…except there would be no one to pay you. Alas, if you still wish the endeavor: May I suggest you search the findagrave site.
January 31st, 2010 @ 11:28 am
The comments on this post are fabulous.
Like you, Maud, I made an early decision to go to law school, for which I continue to pay the consequences. Right now I am thinking of getting out of practice, because it’s not probably right for me, and either trying to teach law for awhile, or getting my MLIS and being a law librarian. I could comb the cases for story ideas.
January 31st, 2010 @ 12:42 pm
You guys, thanks for all of your comments. Reading about your experiences — and fantasy jobs — really cheered and entertained me while I was at my sister’s (writing) last week. I wanted to respond to you one-by-one, but now that we’re at 40 comments, that seems kind of crazy (especially since this essay I’ve been working on still isn’t done).
It’s amazing how much of writers’ lives is devoted to scheming about the least arduous ways to make writing possible, or dreaming up escape routes when writing is possible. Harry Crews always said every writer should learn how to be a short-order cook. That way you could abandon everything, go out on the road, and always find work. Not sure how good his advice is in this recession, though, and it’d never work for me, anyway. I can’t even fry eggs and bacon for two without burning myself.