Writing Can Be A Love, A Passion, A Hobby--But It Doesn't Have to Be a Career
You're still a writer even if it's not your full-time job.
Years ago, I quit my fancy marketing job in book publishing, complete with unlimited free books, an office, an Amex card, and the shocking gift of leaving the office at 5pm, to become a “writer.” It was 2008 and I’m not entirely sure if I was delusional or mad to leave a job in a recession, but I’d just had my book optioned! I was meeting fancy people! I had cupcakes with Lana Del Rey when she was Lizzy Grant with bleached blond hair and obscene nails! Your woman was going places.
Until I sat in front of a computer wondering why I choose crippling self-doubt and anxiety over a consistent paycheck.
The film never came to fruition, my screen writing skills were cringe, as the kids say (stick to prose, Felicia), and I found myself in an empty coffee shop before it was fashionable to stay parked for hours on end, staring at a blank screen. If I wasn’t going to pen a screenplay, I might as well work on the next book!
The next book didn’t come until 2013 when I resigned from a job that had been slowly killing me.
One of the many reasons I loathed my Columbia MFA experience was the need to write on demand. Every two weeks I had to come to workshop with a new story, new characters—all while writing at a glacial pace. So, I used that time to experiment with structure and form, and was routinely humiliated by pretentious rich kids who didn’t work while I had to race back to my full-time job between classes.
Had I learned nothing? Clearly not. But I thought if I had enough space and time to write, I would produce greatness! I would emulate writers who spent their lives gliding from conferences to castles to residencies. I would become Nicole Krauss! Zadie Smith! Amy Hempel! Until I realized I was Felicia Sullivan, a writer who was unemployed for a year, produced nothing, and ended up taking a marketing executive job at a digital agency, which altered my career, writing, and life in ways that weren’t necessarily positive or healthy.
But I digress.
In Rainesford Stauffer’s “Is My Writing a Hobby Or a Career?” the author muses over the balance of art and commerce, or perhaps more apt—art and reality. Stauffer writes:
"Since I was old enough to work, I’d never only had one job, and since I’ve been writing, I’ve never only been a writer. But I’ve always wondered how that would feel. I was used to writing on the side of whatever combination of jobs I had, whether it was working for a nonprofit or working in events for a ballet company that involved a surprising amount of manual labor and, unsurprisingly, no health insurance. I’ve taught toddlers and cleaned bathrooms at a dance studio, and done admin work and random copywriting. I even make a joke about it in the book, paraphrasing When Harry Met Sally: on the side is a big thing for me. I wrote the book on the side. But it felt like the center.
If writing was happening in what some might call margins of my life, did that inherently make it a hobby—or was it actually what knit my life together?"
Like Stauffer, I’ve been working since the womb. More like 13—even when it was illegal to work at that age, but working papers were easy to forge back then. I was cradling babies (the irony doesn’t escape me) and scrubbing floors. At 13.
I’ve never known what it was like not to have a job, multiple side projects, and my writing. I used to joke about all my loves being like children playing harmoniously in the sandbox when it was more like toddlers slinging sand in one another’s eyes or howling because they weren’t getting enough playing time in the box.
For years, I relegated my writing (even though I’d been publishing professionally since I was 25) to a hobby because it hadn’t crept up among the ranks of the biweekly paycheck, 401K and medical benefits. (Side note: I direly miss dental coverage as a freelancer, which possibly says more about the basura health care system in the United States than freelancing, but again, digression).
It was a hobby when my first book was published and featured in a slew of glossy magazines. I boarded planes for my book tour and choked down tears in an airport when some asshole reviewer in the SF Chronicle (maybe? I’ve blocked it out for survival purposes) said my book would’ve been better had I loved my mother more. Ah, the halcyon days of the aughts where women were vilified for not being obedient and preened to perfection.
It was a hobby when my second book was published to tumbleweed and crickets, and thank goodness (LOL!) I have a job because that four-figure advance won’t foot the root canal bill.
It was a hobby until I stopped publishing. Until I stopped viewing my work through the lens of capitalism. Because we’re reared to believe that if what we pursue doesn’t culminate in financial reward it ceases to have meaning. It’s not as relevant or important as the day job we’re likely sleeping our way through.
It took a long time to realize that while I’m passionate about writing, while it’s one of the few born gifts I have—it’s not my only love and it can rightfully share space with parts of marketing that I love (namely consumer behavior research because I love getting into the heads of people much like I need to get into the headspace of my characters). It can share space with animal rescue and cooking and clothing reselling and all the other pursuits that may or may not bear financial fruit.
That realization has created a kind of freedom I’m still grasping to understand. At the core, it’s a reminder we are multitudes. We are multi-passionate. We can be right and left brained. We can be our own strange and beautiful juxtapositions.
Stauffer writes:
By this point, I know many writers who juggle writing alongside other jobs, other responsibilities—other dreams, even, which is perhaps why the “hobby versus job” binary felt stiff to me. Writing shouldn’t be so unstable that one needs another job to support it. But having another job doesn’t diminish the work of writing, either.
I stopped relegating my writing to the kiddie table because it doesn’t pay my bills because it doesn’t have to. I can (god-willing) do other things for sustenance. And my writing doesn’t have to be bombastic and bestselling and all the big and fancy things our society has come to revere and reward. It only needs to be good and worthy to the few who read it. The reward is the act of writing and living and working and loving and pursuing what makes you bolt out of bed in the morning. Not because of the results it might breed but because of the beauty in the attempt.
Felicia, your words are definitely bombastic. I always read, to the end. Please never stop writing.
"Because we’re reared to believe that if what we pursue doesn’t culminate in financial reward it ceases to have meaning."
And that is why Medium has pretty much destroyed my self-confidence as a writer.
Good stuff, Felicia, really good stuff.