Windblown

A windstorm blew through this afternoon. The kids, their friends, and I ran out and stood in it–well away from the tall trees, of course! (I have two extra kiddos overnight because their parents are away celebrating their fifteenth anniversary. Congrats, Pete and Amy!) We’d heard the Emergency Broadcast on the radio as we drove home from school, but the hail stones weren’t near us. Then the rain came and we scampered inside. But the wind whipping around us, the trees worked into a frantic wave … it almost felt like being on a roller coaster. What an awesome world our God made; one so full of power and might!

I subbed again today–world cultures, ethics and law, government, and leadership. Fun stuff! I learned (from a final speech) that HIPAA protects medical information so a fifteen-year old can go on birth control or have an abortion and the info will always be kept from the parents. My immediate question is this: who pays for that service? Is this some kind of insurance fraud? If the parents are held responsible for the bill, but it arrives with a different description that the service provided, it sure seems fraudulent to me. But a fifteen-year old cannot enter into a legally binding agreement … how is the office guaranteed payment?

(And they need a note to have a cough drop at school!)

Came home from work, herded four kids through homework, fixed Chicken Pot Pie (from scratch except crust) and a salad with cranberries and almonds, celebrated Mom’s birthday a day late with all eight of us, enjoyed Dad’s Famous Apple Pie (he sells them for $25/pie and has these cute boxes, which he designed, with his picture on the top), cleaned the whole house including toilets, sang six bedtime songs followed by six bedtime prayers, and I feel good. How can this be?

God is faithful, time and again, to give me the strength I need, when I need it.

ANOTHER job opportunity popped up today. Well, really two. Each time a stable, part-time/full-time job appears, I pray about it and decide it’s not something I can commit to at this point in my life. Which is crazy, because I obviously need to make steady money to support my family.

Why do these opportunities continue to present themselves? Is God letting me confirm my choice multiple times so I become more sure each time that He’s going to provide? Or is He graciously presenting me with yet another chance to follow His leading–which I’m missing–in that direction?

I read a fabulous article today and I snagged the writer’s permission to share it with you. I know this post is getting long, but the piece really convinced me to guard my creativity and writing time. Which is ironic, since it’s supposed to argue for KEEPING a steady job. 🙂

Four Benefits of Keeping Your Day Job

by

Sharon Dunn

The writer wakes up at 8 a.m. Feeling rested and ready for the day, she dons her Nikes and takes an inspiration filled walk through the forest on her forty acre spread. After a leisurely breakfast in a sunny nook and a shower, she brews a latte and sits down at her laptop. Hours stretch before her. Coffee and purple prose flow like the Amazon. Story plots hang almost tangibly in the air, hers for the taking and remaking. She writes uninterrupted in the idea laden silence.

Nothing but time to write. It’s every writer’s dream. But is quitting the regular job really the ideal for a writer? Holding onto the false belief that writing full time is the only way to succeed as a writer is often what keeps some writers from accomplishing anything. Even though I’ve published three novels and numerous shorter pieces, I have continued to work part time as a tutor at a university. Keeping my day job and squeezing writing in when I can, instead of waiting for the ideal of being able to write full time, has proven to be rewarding. I have found four benefits to keeping my job while pursuing my writing dream.

Less financial pressure means more productivity. A predictable paycheck contributes a great deal to peace of mind. Living in a constant state of panic every time a bill arrives makes focusing on various writing projects that much harder. Jim Denney the author of Quit Your Day Job: How to Sleep Late, Do What You Enjoy, and Make a Ton of Money as a Writer! even acknowledges that not everyone is cut out emotionally to write full time. Some writers “know that the anxiety and insecurity of the working writer’s life would only dry up their creative juices, so they hang onto the regular paycheck and the 401(k).”

Writing is a very up and down business financially. Book publication doesn’t guarantee steady income. Only 1% of writers make their living solely from writing. Royalty payments fluctuate. Of every five books published, three will not earn out their advance, one will break even and one will make money. It makes sense to have some level of income that is predictable. Deciding to keep a day job, cut back to part time or quit altogether largely depends on the psychological responses of the individual. While some people are motivated to write by lack of a pay check, others find that financial security makes the muses show up with greater consistency.

A job provides structure causing efficient use of time. Tasks usually expands to the amount of time allotted for them. The problem with having eight to ten hours to write is that it often gives a writer too much wiggle room, making her more likely to procrastinate. A great deal of discipline is required to use all those hours productively.

Sometimes, less time is better. I first started to write when I was pregnant with my oldest son. While my babies were little, my husband watched them for an hour or I wrote while they napped. Knowing that I only had limited time to write made me very productive—no office organizing/chair wiggling/coffee making time allowed. When I sat down to write, I had already mentally brainstormed what my first couple of sentences would be.

Robin Lee Hatcher author of Beyond the Shadows worked full time as an office administrator. As a single mom, she was the sole support for her family. She set aside 7 to 9 p.m. Monday through Thursday and Saturday mornings to write. “I wrote long hand on legal pads in the evenings (no computer back then) and typed the manuscript on the office typewriter on coffee breaks and lunch hours. I wrote in every spare moment I had.” Robin structured her writing time around work and family, publishing nine novels before quitting her office job to write full time.

Writers often think the lack of time is what keeps them from being productive. In fact, the barrier is usually something different and claiming lack of time is the excuse. Even the busiest person can find an hour a day to devote to writing if writing is really what she wants to do. The question that needs to be asked is not ‘do I have enough time to write,’ but ‘what I am willing to give up in order to write?’ Planning writing around a work schedule can make a writer more efficient.

A job keeps you normal and connected to an audience. At a discussion panel of agents at a writers’ conference I attended, one of the agents pointed out that writers who quit their day jobs become weird. The calls to their agents increase and become more emotional and desperate. Even though writing is a solitary activity, human beings, even writers, were designed to interact with other people. If all your coworkers are imaginary (which is what happens when you write fiction), you run the risk of becoming a little eccentric.

The nice thing about having a job to go to is that there is built-in interaction with other people. The bonus of a “real” job is that it connects us with flesh and blood readers. Instead of just having an age group or statistics as a way of understanding who I am writing for, some of the people at work read my mysteries and give me on the spot feedback. Talking with co-workers about what they are reading gives an idea about trends and what a reader looks for in a book. Even conversations that are not about books indicate the needs, preferences, and heartaches that people deal with.

Jobs are a treasure chest for ideas and found research. In my first book, Romance Rustlers and Thunderbird Thieves, part of the mystery revolved around buffalo leaving Yellowstone Park. My job as a tutor involves helping students in beginning composition classes write a persuasive paper. One the students’ favorite issues concerns the buffalo wandering out of Yellowstone, risking infecting cattle with brucellosis. When the buffalo issue became part of my mystery, I didn’t have to do any outside research to feel like an expert. I had already read a hundred papers on the topic.

Almost any job can be incorporated into a story. Description of a profession becomes real to a reader when details are believable. Working at a job provides insider info that reading about or watching someone else do the job doesn’t. Some of the action for my second book, Sassy Cinderella and the Valiant Vigilante, takes place at a university and has professors as supporting characters. I didn’t have to do any field research or interviews to write that part of the book.

Even the most mundane work allows opportunity to people watch and gather raw material for characters both in appearance and personality. More than once I have worked with a student and thought “that person belongs in a book.” Story ideas often come from discussions we engage in and from overheard conversations at work.

Let’s face it, if all you do is sit in a room and write, pretty soon you will be writing stories about sitting in a room and writing. A “real” job gets you out in the world interacting with people, garnering story ideas while reducing financial stress.

What kind of job works best? If it is your dream to succeed as a writer, the ideal job is not always the one that pays the most. Other factors must be considered. First, does your job have any built in “down time”? During slow times in the semester, I edit my work, brainstorm and read books about writing while I sit at my tutoring carrel. Indirectly, I am getting paid for honing my craft as a writer. Seasonal work or employment with a school or university provides time when you are not working at all. At my tutoring job, I have a huge break around Christmas as well as summers off.

Because your primary focus is writing, flexibility is another factor to consider when finding a job that fits with writing. Eric Wiggin author of The Hannah’s Island series for girls and The Gift of Grandparenting worked a night job at a fish plant as part of the clean up crew. Eric utilized mornings when his brain functioned best to write. His boss was fairly lenient as to when Eric cleaned as long as the job got done between 5 p.m. and 9 a.m. The right boss is important too. An employer who respects your writing dream is likely to give time off to attend a writers’ conference without requiring an act of congress.

The final thing to consider is finding a job that fuels creativity rather than drains it? A high stress job where issues go unresolved, where you often bring work home with you (either literally or emotionally) and have to deal with difficult people usually sends the muse packing. At the university where I tutor, I also spent several semesters teaching. I found that the creative energy I had to put into writing lesson plans and lectures zapped me mentally. Sitting down to work on a short story when my eyes were glazed over from reading textbooks and student papers was nearly impossible. For that reason, I stopped teaching. The people interaction I get from tutoring fuels rather than steals my creativity. For some writers, a physical job offers a nice break from the hard mental work of writing.

So what would be a more realistic picture of the writer’s ideal life?

A screeching alarm wakes the writer. Red letters glow 5:30 am. Fatigue and the fogginess of sleep whisper seductively for her to stay in bed. Resisting their advances, she throws off the covers and stumbles to the room where her computer waits. She has ty ninety minutes before the children wake up. Then she has to get them ready for school and herself dressed for work. With a glance at the clock, she clicks the power button and opens a file. Coffee would be nice, but there is no time for that. Her fingers touch the keyboard and the magic takes over. Immediately, she is lost in the story, sometimes racing to keep up with her thoughts and sometimes pushing through slow passages and poorly chosen words, but always the time is golden, precious because of its scarcity.

“Mommy, I can’t find any matching socks.” Her seven year old stands glassy eyed by the door to her office, which is also her laundry and ironing space. More than socks will need to be found before they can get out the door. There always is. The chaos of the day and the stress it causes is easier to face when she thinks about coming back again tomorrow morning to sit at the computer and be engulfed by the sacred magic, lost in the world she creates and controls. With a glance at the computer, she grabs the suit she needs for work from the clean laundry pile and turns out the light.