Working Writer

I have a confession to make: when I started this website I had dreams of publishing regular stories, essays, and progress reports on my upcoming novel. Having a place dedicated to my writing, maybe even with a modest following, had been something that intrigued me. Also, I saw it as a vehicle to nudge myself to regularly sit down and come up with new texts.

And this all happened in a way. Compared to two years ago, at a time when this “writing thing” started out for me in earnest, when I seemed not to be able to hold in the sentences anymore as they were bludgeoning their way out of my brain, I’ve now reached a more steady pace. Many mornings when I wake up I brew myself a cup of coffee and sit down at my desk. Sometimes during the day I pull out my notebook to jot down an idea, an exciting word or a phrase that intrigues me.

But there is also: life. In my case, not so much distraction is coming from my private world, which is pretty uneventful apart from my obsessive travel (but this I can combine splendidly with my writing efforts!). I am neither independently wealthy, nor ever in danger of becoming a kept woman, which means I need to work for a living. Hence, my weeks are full and I am usually preoccupied with whatever is just the most important topic at my office.

I am in good company, as many writers had jobs or some sort of occupation that kept them busy: Hemingway was a journalist, which seems to be a good kind of day job for a writer. Virginia Woolf ran a publishing house with her husband Leonard. Doing this, she certainly had complete creative freedom over her own works, and understood what makes a good book quite literally: they were often binding books by hand. I assume this was physically demanding, and certainly did not help her frayed nerves, on top of running a printing business giving her financial worries especially during the post-WW I era. And we all know how that ended.

A friend who wrote her thesis on The Bluest Eye once told me that Toni Morrison worked as a senior editor at Random House while raising two children as a single mother, famously waking up at 4 am to write her early novels. Another one: Franz Kafka worked as an insurance clerk (bureaucracy, anyone?). He wrote his masterpieces late at night, actually out of sheer necessity, since his exhausting daytime shifts drained his energy. T.S. Eliot’s job at Lloyds Bank was comparably smooth and easy: the poet openly preferred the structured routine of a corporate desk job because it kept his mind sharp for poetry.

Me, I also work in a bank. But apart from the occasional HR-related article that I get published in a magazine, I tend not to indulge in too many crossovers between my “lives”. Things that happen at the office I let stay at the office: even though I work in a very people-related environment, where lots of crazy shit happens on a good day, I’m making a point of not using these stories in my writing. Too close to home, maybe? Of course I want to protect the trust of the people in my office, and I feel I have enough weird ideas to draw on anyway.

As I‘m finishing up this entry, one ironic point came through: I started this website so that I could force myself to a more regular writing output. And now I‘m describing why I don‘t really manage to do that. Hypocritical? Maybe. But then, another +/- 1000 words successfully published. Could have something to do with the fact that I’m currently not at work.