In 2018, as a younger writer in a different phase of life, I was thrilled to interview prolific author William Vollmann. A digital magazine employed me at the time, but it clearly wouldn’t forever, and while Vollmann and I talked, my infant daughter slept in her crib in her nearby room. One piece of Vollmann’s advice struck me: “Don’t write for money.” Although writing earned him his living, he understood that, in a larger sense, separating your income from your creative output provides distinct benefits. Vollmann’s words rang with the authority of experience, so I listened.
I was at a crossroads. After transforming from a childless, car-camping bohemian to a forty-three-year-old home-owning father, I needed to draw my income from a job more stable than one in magazine and book publishing. The value of creating for creating’s sake wasn’t news to me, but at that stage in life I still clung to the dream of writing or editing for money. My dad always encouraged me to make my living by monetizing something I enjoyed. Writing stimulated my intellect and fed my creative appetite, so why not monetize that? As a part-time editor under contract at that magazine, I still also believed that freelancing could afford me a more liberated lifestyle than traditional employment. Look: a flexible schedule! A home office! No authoritarian boss! But after years spent grinding it out as a freelancer with multiple side jobs, those side jobs had started to resemble the main jobs, and freelancing didn’t set me free.
Jobs at a university writing center, a tea shop, and a bookstore, as well as dog-sitting—this “regular work” let me crank out nonfiction I’m still proud of, but as I aged, the idea of subsisting off of articles and contract gigs, without insurance or a 401(k), came to resemble an artifact from youth—not a naive youthful notion but a professional path that our modern world seemed less able to support. We prose writers are now like poets who, brilliant as they are, could never sell enough poems to pay the rent. William Carlos Williams worked as a physician for a reason. What to do?
At age forty-nine, after a brief period of mourning amid failed attempts to secure a gig teaching creative writing, I chose a profession that involves writing documents instead of narratives, and e-mails instead of essays. I’m a proposal and communications writer at an eco-friendly commercial janitorial company. Trust me: I never thought I’d say these words, but I love janitorial. This profession serves public health and my family. It removes the anxiety and guilt of struggling in the creative economy, and it still leaves me enough mental energy to write my stuff on the side. In fact my writing feels as sharp as ever. I’ve made peace with the reality I’m never going to be the guy who sold a book to a big New York publisher, and this personal paradigm shift has illuminated the brilliant facets of Vollmann’s advice. Making a living outside of the literary world empowers many artists with health insurance, mental energy to write, and relief from the worry of where your next check will come from.
Memoirist Karleigh Frisbie Brogan has worked at Trader Joe’s for twenty years. Poet Ruth Awad works as senior director of executive communications for a coastal property insurance provider. Talia Lakshmi Kolluri, author of the story collection What We Fed to the Manticore (Tin House, 2022), works as a city attorney in Fresno, California. While running Perfect Day Publishing, Michael Heald used to serve beer at a pub. Author and climber Geoff Powter worked as a psychologist during part of the time he was winning his thirteen Canadian National Magazine Awards. Arizona poet Shawnte Orion produces eyeglasses in a factory. Sean Singer’s first book, Discography (Yale University Press, 2002), was selected by W. S. Merwin for the Yale Series of Younger Poets, and he used to drive a taxi.
One universal truth is that writers come in all forms. Like making art, making a life is a creative act, one that, if you have the privilege of support and mobility, you can try to customize over time. It is a privilege to have the time to invest in activities that don’t generate your primary revenue. Hobbies, leisure, intellectual pursuits—not everyone can afford these when living paycheck to paycheck or drowning in debt. If you can, then the process of creating a writing life may involve testing how much of your feet you keep inside and outside of the literary pool. “I’ve done it both ways and enjoyed both for different reasons,” says Leland Cheuk, author of the novels No Good Very Bad Asian (C&R Press, 2019) and The Misadventures of Sulliver Pong (Chicago Center for Literature and Publishing, 2015). “It really depends on what you want from your life at that time.”
Cheuk has more than fifteen years of marketing experience, and the tech world has given him enough perspective on the literary world to help him establish a healthy separation between his paid profession and his creative endeavors. During a break from marketing he experienced what it was like to write full-time and teach on occasion. That led him back to tech marketing full-time. “I missed working in the team environment,” he says, “and I didn’t have to deal with a very tight job market for creative writing instructors.” Creative writing programs can provide a number of skills, but a nine-to-five equips many writers with the structure necessary to finish projects they start, because when you have less free time, you tend to use it more strategically. “Having a demanding day job really forces you to be disciplined about getting your writing in,” Cheuk says.
Novelist Marie Myung-Ok Lee agrees. Author of the acclaimed Finding My Voice (Houghton Mifflin, 1992) and Somebody’s Daughter (Beacon Press, 2005), and a cofounder of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Lee eventually found her own happy medium in academia, but she started in finance—first in an econometrics forecasting department at Standard and Poor’s in Manhattan, then in equity research at Goldman Sachs.
By age nine Lee knew she wanted to be a writer, but her immigrant parents wanted her to be a doctor. “In order to secretly continue my dream without letting my parents know,” Lee says, “I majored in econ, because it had the fewest courses, and I could go work at a place like Goldman Sachs.” Finance required her to get to work before the markets opened, so every day she woke up at 4 or 4:30 AM to squeeze in one hour of writing. She kept that schedule even on vacation back then; later it enabled her to write around the medical needs of her disabled son. “That’s why my book The Evening Hero took eighteen years. But I got it done, by doing it every day.”
Lee hated finance. It was sexist, stressful. One wrong decimal point could lead to termination. But economics taught her the concept of “opportunity cost.” The opportunity cost of investing in a graduate writing degree paled against the opportunity cost of making actual investments and generating revenue through her own small business in which she consulted on business school application essays.
“In the process of writing, you end up picking up esoteric knowledge,” says Lee, “and because of my nonwriting job, I became an early investor in cell phones and technology like that.” She amassed enough money to quit Goldman Sachs and spent an entire year writing. Even though she didn’t get published that year and had to return to work as a freelancer at a different bank, Houghton Mifflin eventually published the young adult novel she wrote that year, the groundbreaking Finding My Voice (1992), as well as her middle-grade novel, If It Hadn’t Been for Yoon Jun (1993). Her book advance didn’t provide a lot of money, but that publishing contract provided enough encouragement to continue writing fiction, and it gave her practical parents what she called “proof of concept” of this career’s viability. She no longer had to hide her writing life behind her other profession. “Finance is all about return on investment,” Lee says, “and it’s easy for people—even high-achieving, cultured people—to say that art has little to no return on investment. But it does, and my time in finance had a large return on investment for my writing.” This has proved true both materially and in the benefits for her creative practice. Having grown up in a tiny Minnesota town, she found that the world of New York City finance expanded her perspective—something she sees the graduate students she now teaches often lack, spending inordinate amounts of time exclusively in writing classes.
Leland Cheuk sees too many books being written about writers and teachers. That nearsightedness can only limit literature’s appeal to the masses. “Working a job gives you the opportunity to meet people you wouldn’t meet in a university setting,” says Cheuk, “and inhabit a setting that’s more reflective of the world your readers live in. How can that be bad for writing?”
Lee’s lighter academic load works for her family and provides enough room to raise her son and still create. “My job is related to writing but not to my publishing,” she says, “so I can decouple from ‘Oh, my novel’s got to do really well!’ or ‘Oh, I have to get money for this piece!’ That is mentally taxing. It’s not the same as working as a bricklayer, but there’s something there. I’m freed and less anxious by not having my writing make my money.”
A part-time, hybrid model works for journalist and historian Hugh Ryan, too.
Ryan, author of The Women’s House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison (Bold Type Books, 2022), has worked the same job—in development for the nonprofit Urban Justice Center—for his entire writing career. After various arrangements during his twenty years with the agency, from a full-timer to an occasional freelancer, he now works there twenty hours per week. The justice center provides his health insurance and one-third of his annual income. The other two-thirds comes from speaking engagements about queer history, teaching, and writing-related projects.
Ryan spent most of his twenties unclear about his career, but he knew he loved writing. After three years as a social worker for queer youth, Ryan decided he needed a less emotionally taxing profession. A six-month stay in Berlin introduced him to many bohemian expats who seemed to live charmed, free-floating lives, and one day he made two lists of careers. “There were only two jobs on the ‘What am I good at?’ list that had anything to do with the ‘Life I want to have’ list,” Ryan says, “and those were graphic web design and writing.” Ryan returned to New York and tried all sorts of writing: journalism, performance monologues, children’s books. Eventually he started working at the nonprofit that let him try grant and communications writing.
For a while he thought it best to have a job that required lots of writing. “I look back now and think that might have been a mistake. But at the time, that was definitely my goal.”
Even though a day job frees writers from the fiscal challenges of constantly hustling up projects to pay expenses, writing all the time at work can prove counterproductive. When you spend your whole workday sitting, wordsmithing, and typing, you can find yourself lacking the energy to write after your shift. Today, working twenty hours per week, Ryan says he has found the ideal balance. “It lets me both pay my rent so I’m not scared all the time, and it does not drain me so much that I can’t do anything else,” he says.
This half-time arrangement allowed Ryan to balance the two sides of his work life, and he published his first book, When Brooklyn Was Queer: A History, with St. Martin’s Press in 2019, the year he turned forty-one. “I’m not a fast writer,” he says. “I discovered I needed a lot of time to sit and think about things, and that means I needed to know where my rent was coming from. And I needed a job that, at the end of the day, I left behind…. That was revolutionary.”
For novelist Rene Denfeld, the relationship between career and creativity is even stronger. For the past fifteen years, Denfeld has worked in Portland, Oregon, as a licensed investigator for death row and other defense cases. “All of my novels have been inspired by my work,” she says. Although an attorney’s duty to legal confidentiality prohibits her from discussing her cases’ particulars, she can write about what her cases have taught her through her fiction. “Often what inspires me is less the facts of a case than the themes that emerge, like what is innocence? What is guilt? Is the innocent person behind the bars the monster, or are we, collectively, for putting him there and doing little to get him out? I [also] get to be actively involved in helping others, and I think this imbues my work with a certain joy.”
C.B. Bernard, author of the novel Ordinary Bear (Blackstone, 2024), sought that joy as a full-time freelancer only to discover how much pressure it put on him to always secure more work. Bernard has also worked as a newspaper journalist, an advertising copywriter, and a nonprofit communications director. For the past few years, he has worked as managing editor of a technology magazine. “I do sometimes wonder what I might have accomplished if I’d given my full attention to one career rather than two, but that line of thought only leads to gloom,” says Bernard. “Over the years it’s gotten more difficult to maintain two parallel careers—a day job and writing novels—with the pressure to succeed at both increasingly high. But I’ve got a mortgage and family obligations, and as I get older, health care and a reliable, steady income provide some security—or at least the perception of it.”
Writing outside of your profession presents precisely this choice: How much of your writing time and energy are you willing to trade for security? It’s easier to do this when you don’t have children, or debt, or are living paycheck to paycheck. Whether you’re a UX designer, wine merchant, or car salesperson—if the job you work allows you enough time and financial stability to write the stuff you love, then you’re winning. Stay open to new challenges enough to make crucial discoveries about what fits your needs, and when it’s time to stay or go. Like I said, I never imagined I’d work in the janitorial world, but I love it. In the words of one coworker: “AI is never going to clean your toilet.” As far as janitorial seems from the literary world, the writing and editing skills that literature taught me—engineering intros to capture readers’ attention, evoking emotions with sensory language, centering people in your “content”—all inform my proposals and communications work. And best of all, when I fall while skateboarding, my job provides the medical coverage I need. When I get paid, part of my check goes into an actual retirement program. Those are benefits I traded for years as a freelancer.
If you’re a dreamer trying to navigate the maze we call the writing life, studying other people’s professional experiences can help you find your way. Though maybe you’re more like Hugh Ryan: If someone had told his twenty-something self what kind of writing would work best for him, he would have ignored them. “I needed to stumble there myself,” he says.
Aaron Gilbreath is a journalist and essayist. He has written for Harper’s, the Atlantic, Adventure Journal, and the Dublin Review, and his environmental writing for Red Canary Magazine won a 2024 Los Angeles Press Club Award. His newest book is The Heart of California: Exploring the San Joaquin Valley (Bison Books, 2020).
Thumbnail credit: Tiffany Talbot