TUMBLR
A scrapbook of stuff I'm reading / looking at / listening to / thinking about...
Posts tagged "day job"
On doing what you love
“The key to eternal happiness is low overhead and no debt.”
—Lynda Barry
Anybody who tells people to “do what you love no matter what” should also have to teach a money management course.
Low overhead + no debt + “do what you love” = a good life.
“I deserve nice things” + debt + “do what you love” = a time bomb.
(Image from Steal Like An Artist)
I’m discarding my own advice and leaving my day job today. Here’s an explanation.
William Carlos Williams on the freedom of keeping your day job
In his Autobiography, William Carlos Williams recounts what led him to pursue medicine as a career:
No one was ever going to be in a position to tell me what to write, and you can say that again. No one, and I meant no one (for money) was ever (never) going to tell me how or what I was going to write. That was number one…
I wasn’t going to make any money by writing. Therefore I had to have a means to support myself…for I didn’t intend to die for art nor to be bedbug food for it…
It was money that finally decided me. I would continue medicine, for I was determined to be a poet; only medicine, a job I enjoyed, would make it possible for me to live and write as I wanted to. I would live: that first, and write, by God, as I wanted to if it took me all eternity to accomplish my design. My furious wish was to be normal, undrunk, balanced in everything. I would marry (but not yet!) have children and still write, in fact, therefore to write. I would not court disease, live in the slums for the sake of art, give lice a holiday. I would not “die for art,” but live for it, grimly! and work, work, work (like Pop), beat the game and be free (like Mom, poor soul!) to write, write as I alone should write…
Filed under: day job
Necessity, stupid. From his FAQ:
Your novels sell pretty well. Why do you still work at Time?
That’s a good question. I’ve talked about this before, a couple of times. Bottom line is, I do make a pretty good living from my books. I look at some other writers who are in comparable places in their careers and think, gorram it, they write fiction full time, why don’t I? But I can’t. If I’d made certain decisions earlier in my life, and not made a few others, I could. But as it is I have a lot of overhead. For reasons that don’t bear going into, I have to live in New York, and that’s incredibly expensive. Also a lot of people depend on the money from the Magicians books, not just me. And it’s not like working for Time is a crap job. It’s a great job. It doesn’t pay as much as The Magicians pays, but it pays enough.
Emphasis mine. (Lynda Barry: “The key to eternal happiness is low overhead and no debt.”) I’m reading Grossman’s The Magicians right now and really enjoying it.
“Even after he published, Prufrock and The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot continued to work his day job at a bank.” Great article about why Eliot chose to keep working, even after all his friends basically Kickstartered him and tried to get him to quit. “…nobody wants to think about the poet at the water cooler, or, even worse, pouring over actuarial tables.”
…for artists without a lucky early break, rich parents or benefactors, a day job is often the only way to survive. It needn’t mean that fame and fortune aren’t just around the corner: Joy Division’s Ian Curtis worked in an unemployment office until 1979, well after the band had released their debut EP. Van Morrison immortalised his old job as a window cleaner in the 1982 song Cleaning Windows; composer Philip Glass wasn’t able to quit his jobs as a plumber and a taxi-driver until the age of 41.
The piece of advice no one wants to hear. (Gets a big section in chapter 9.)
