Substack tells me this is my 50th post and since it’s about making a living maybe it’s a good time to ask you to support this Untitled Thought Project if you’re so inclined and able. I’m working on posts about:
An open letter to Deborah Levy regarding Real Estate
Art about climate change
Diaries (mine, other peoples)
Passages cut from my forthcoming nonfiction book
And an attempt to figure out why I take pictures of passages of books that I’m reading when I know damn well I’ve not reviewed any of them for the last decade.
If you’re enjoying this and want me to keep doing it, consider chipping in. Thanks! : )
This summer it seems I keep having conversations with other writers about money and time, and the many decisions we all make to trade our time for money, and the fact that artists tend to make these decisions more anxiously.
A former student wrote to me wondering if he should leave behind the security of a full-time job in order to give more time to his writing. He mentioned that a character in Annie Dillard’s novel The Maytrees says something about how valuing your time more than money will benefit your writing. Was this the answer? And was quitting one’s job the way he could demonstrate that value?
I wrote back—1
Everyone has their own threshold of how much uncertainty they can tolerate and it changes over time. I made some decisions in my twenties that forced me to put up with more uncertainty and live on less money, and I know that those situations taught me to value my time much more than my income, at least for a while. This keeps changing though— how do we know which jobs to turn down because they devalue our time too much, and which to accept to keep ourselves afloat? When choosing less money and more time, how do we know if we’re taking a reasonable risk or if we’re being willfully blind?
I’m not sure if that’s an answer. I think anyone who wants creativity at the center of their life has to constantly calibrate and re-calibrate the structure of their days in order not to lose sight of either set of obligations— the internal (your creative life) and the external (the bills). That calibration is never something you’re done making.
In fact I just had to make a difficult decision to turn down some work that would have been steady, but wasn’t worth the money/time exchange for me. It was a hard call, mainly because even though I’ve been living on my writing and teaching for years now, I always have a fear the opportunities will run out.
But maybe it’s worth admitting that I’ve never had the opportunity to have a regular day job, despite trying many times to get one. So I have no idea how hard it may be to leave such a situation. Many amazing writers made their writing fit into their career and domestic work (Grace Paley for instance), while others never once worried about money (Edith Wharton.)
It’s easy to forget, at this point in my life, how hard it used to be to defend my writing time (even if everything I was writing was pretty much shit) and difficult it was to have any faith that I would eventually find a way to support myself through writing. I basically pivoted between those two anxieties from age 22-28 or so, after which new anxieties took over. Still, wondering about whether I’d ever publish a book used to be so constant that even long after I had written and sold and published my first novel I would sometimes realize I was compulsively thinking over the question of whether I would ever publish a book.
When I was in college I worked in cafés then in a commercial kitchen, and when I was in graduate school I worked as an assistant, cook, tutor, and nanny despite being encouraged not to do so. My writing probably suffered (I didn’t write anything in grad school I was happy with) but I couldn’t tolerate the amount of uncertainty that going into debt would have brought. I was also young enough to have the energy to bounce between school and work and writing and reading. My tolerance for that kind of pace is much lower now.
Working through university helped me get into the habit of waking up early and spending at least a couple hours writing or trying to write. But I also made the decision to sell my eggs so I could eventually take some time off from working so much, injecting myself with hormones in between classes and going back to school hours after the extraction. Once grad school was done, I managed to find a sustainable way to pay the bills and write a lot without selling my DNA, a cooperatively owned and operated business that I was a part of for about five years. (I wrote about it ten years ago for The New York Times.)
But I’m almost forty now and the calculus is different. After a decade in New York full time, then a few years of being in New York part-time, I don’t live in there at all anymore, a decision that was partially financial (though actually a lot more personal, a topic for another time.)
Oddly, this moment of leaving New York has coincided with a commission to write a short book about the city for a series that’s going to first appear in French.2 As I was finishing up the draft this summer I found that there’s no way for me to write about New York without returning again and again to the topic of material survival.3
At the same time, New York is full of opportunities for writers (not to mention the fact that I find it really inspiring and motivating to live there) and once any place truly becomes home, it can be difficult to go elsewhere. I was emailing with Kate Zambreno a few weeks ago about, in her words “the tragicomedy of trying to survive as a writer or person in a capitalist hellscape.” Kate has two kids in New York and multiple adjunct classes each semester and does manage to keep up with the demands, but, as we pondered, at what cost? And how long should anyone be running on all cylinders?
(Is this a good place to mention that MFA programs could not function without immense reserves of underpaid adjunct? I think so, yes.)
Because as much as we may learn to value our time highly, that doesn’t mean that our publishers, universities, or other employers will be able or willing to value it similarly. Knowing that, you have to be careful about who or what you hand your time over to and what compass they’re using to determine the value of your hours. (Is this a good time to plug cooperatively run businesses? Uh huh.)
One of the main things I think writers benefit from is still one of the hardest things for most of us to come by— empty space in the day, time to get a bit lost in (mindless scrolling does not count), lying on the floor doing nothing, a pointless walk, a few minutes staring at a plant or a wall or your dog. Sometimes when we hand over what seems like “free” time to work or email or scrolling we’re actually robbing ourselves of the most secretly valuable minutes we have.
These exchanges with my student and with Kate reminded me of one of Sarah Manguso’s How to Have a Career: Advice to Young Writers which was published in 2012 and is still one of the things I direct younger writers toward who are trying to figure out how to make a life about this.
While I was searching for the link today, however, I came across an interview from a couple years ago in which Sarah had a kind of negative reaction to being reminded of her past advice. She and the interviewer ended up going through a few points Sarah raised in the original piece, and she gave a bit more context to why she had an impulse to distance herself from the piece (both of these links are worth reading in full by the way.)
It’s the last section of Sarah’s advice that is supposed to turn the rest of it on its head. I’d never thought of it like that, but as I re-read it, it’s true.
Here’s where she ends:
Onward. Once you’ve truly begun, slow down. The difference between publishing two good books and forty mediocre books is terribly large. Don’t expend energy in writing and publishing that would be better used in your family or community. Become tempered by life. Make compromises for love. Provide a service to the world. These experiences form the adult mind. Without them both you and your work will remain juvenile.
Which is the flip side of the value-time-over-money precept when it comes to making decisions about what sort of jobs to take on and which to avoid. One thing I’ve sometimes known and sometimes forgotten is that writing is a side effect of living, not the other way around. There are years that are for listening and reading and not producing that much. Sometimes doing your work is a critical and life-sustaining act, and other times writing is just something you’re hiding in; our creative lives can be valuable, they are not the only thing.
I emailed Sarah to see if there is anything she’s add to this twelve-year-old list and she had one thing to say (which won’t surprise you if you read her recent novel, LIARS:
If you live in a community property state, sign a prenup before you marry so that your intellectual property (book royalties, etc.) belongs to you alone after you divorce.
(She added that she was grateful that the “infernal piece” was helpful to me.)
As I wrote to Kate, it is indeed a challenge to make these constantly shifting calculations about how to survive and find temporary shelter in a world that continually devalues art, but you can’t forget that you need to provide that temporary shelter for others as often as you seek it for yourself. It’s not that you need to make a living so much as you need to be a part of something worth living for.
Edited for clarity.
One of the strangest and luckiest out of the blue assignments I have ever gotten in my life.
Did you know there are more millionaires in New York than un-housed people?