Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

A reader’s question on a recent post made me think a bit.

Is writing an escape from my day job, or is my day job an escape from writing?

At first thought I said, “Why, that’s easy!” but then I thought again.

My writing “career” has had three distinct phases, so far:

• Apprentice Writer
• Professional (albeit part-time) Writer
• Freelance/Avocational Writer

In none of these was writing my “day job.” I’m a software developer by vocation; that’s my monkey-boy day-job, and it is whence my main income has always come.

(Yes, I just used “whence” in a sentence…don’t freak out. You did fine the other day when I used “agley,” didn’t you?)

But has writing always been an escape from the day job? Have I always looked forward to the task of writing? Has writing always brought me joy, made me happy?

When I first started writing seriously–which is another way to say “when I knew nothing about my craft”–writing was definitely an escape from the day job. Everything was new, everything was fresh, and I could do whatever I wanted. The more I learned, though, the more it became…not work, but a challenge. Structure, plot, characterization, voice, style, dialogue, even the piddly little details of punctuation that I never had to worry about in casual writing, I had to learn it and I had to put it into practice. It was damned hard to do well, and even harder to figure out when I wasn’t doing it well and why. But I worked diligently, and with the encouragement of writerly friends, persevered.

I sold a handful of stories and turned my pen to novels. I wrote one, then another, then another, and then another before I entered the second phase of my writing career.

I quickly found that writing a novel for professional publication is very, very different than writing on my own. My time was not my own. I had deadlines. I had responsibilities. The publishing industry is a machine, and The Machine, I learned, was pitiless.

Writing a novel on my own schedule, workshopping it with colleagues, even the trials and agonies of submissions and rejections, it was all a cakewalk compared to writing a novel for The Machine. Some writers have no trouble turning out one, two, even three novels in a single year, but for me, taking a novel from idea to final draft to publication in twelve months was grueling.

For the years 2001-2004, on top of my full-time monkey-boy day-job (which often included 60-, 80-, and–once–a 100-hour week), I was also writing part time, putting in 20-30 hours each week. During those years, I wrote the first four books of the Fallen Cloud Saga. One book a year. Small surprise that I ended up with a stress-induced TIA in the middle of it all.

Was writing an escape for me during those years? I think I can honestly say that it wasn’t. It was a job–it was another job–and it was not fun.

Then my publisher dropped me. Sales weren’t strong enough, so they cut their losses and ran. My next book was another hard-to-market genre-bender, so my agent said she thought we’d benefit from a split, and she dropped me, too.

That was that. My professional writing career was over.

I now write (once more) when I want to, and on my own schedule. I have written my ninth novel, finishing the Fallen Cloud Saga, and am working on a new book. Writing is once again an escape from the work-a-day world.

Usually.

Sometimes, like right now, when life looms large, writing can be burdensome. But then I remember: there are all sorts of “writing” that fall under that heading.

Writing a novel is a Big Thing that can be too hard to manage when energy is low. But writing a letter to a friend is writing, too. So is writing a poem or a vignette.

This blog is a form of writing, and though trying to come up with a subject for the day’s post can be a chore, I still find joy in the act of writing. Like a few days ago when, talking about cars, I fashioned the phrase, “the Ford Pinto whose body was made of New York Lace held together by a dozen daily prayers.” I really liked that phrase; I smiled when I wrote it. Later, a drop-by-reader commented, saying that s/he laughed out loud when s/he read it.

More joy. Right there.

Even when I was in the depths of The Machine, there was joy in writing. In the Fallen Cloud books, there are phrases, lines, whole scenes that still raise my hackles and thrill me with their beauty. There are parts I’ve re-read and said, Damn, I wish I’d written that! Except I did.

So while writing hasn’t always been an escape, it’s always brought joy. Sometimes the joy doesn’t outweigh the burden, but it always lightens the load.

Thanks for the question, and for the excuse to reflect.

k