How to Be a Writer with a Full Time Job

After a long day of crunching numbers or answering calls, there are few people who can resist picking up the remote and passively receiving the jump-cut world. However, it is often in these scraps of time when writers with full-time jobs must reclaim themselves and practice their art. Here are some strategies to stay focused as an artist once all the bills are paid.

Instructions

1. Take a moment and ask yourself why writing is important to your life. In a letter, Rainer Marie Rilke once advised a young poet to ask himself whether or not he could survive without writing. If he could, then he should not be a poet, but instead pursue some other life. Unfortunately, without the patronage of the wealthy, making a living as a serious writer of fiction or poetry isn't as cut-and-dry as it seemed to Mr. Rilke. However, the insight of his question remains. If you are to have the discipline an artist needs, it must be because your work is not just fun, but necessary to you.

2. Find out what time of day you work best. Some writers prefer the morning before the day has worn them down; others like the thick wrap of night. Ted Kooser, a recent poet laureate, gets up prior to the world's waking in order to compose and edit his poems before heading off to an insurance company. Wallace Stevens did the same. Find what time works best for you and set it aside. It may be that you can only do this a few times a week, but make sure to keep a regular schedule. Again, fortitude is the name of the game. Writing is hard work indeed.

3. Set aside time to edit your pieces. Often, fragments written on the back of receipts and business cards can pile up from miscellaneous situations. The hardest work of being a writer is going back to these "flashes of genius" and working them into a polished composition. This process can require some sacrifices for the sake of unity, and the sign of a great writer is the one who can cut the obtusely brilliant line he loves most for the sake of a great story or poem.

4. Get feedback from fellow writers. When you are slaving away like Kafka until 3 a.m., it is sometimes essential to at least let others know what you have been up to. If you can, solicit comments and advise. One of the greatest aspects of being a writer is to develop friendships and social bonds over shared artistic concerns. Having an audience, real or imagined, is important to any piece of writing.

5. Remember to have fun. No matter how much life might get you down, there is always that strange, addictive combination of wonder, disappointment and desperation that comes with forging the written language.