Aine Greaney - Writer with a Day Job: Inspiration & Exercises to Help You Craft a Writing Life Alongside Your Career

If youre reading this on the morning commuter train, you know all about the push and pull between writing and earning a living. Ditto if youre standing there taking a quick, lunch-hour browse in the bookstore (and you found this booklucky you!). Youre a writer, a dreamer, a scribbler. People tell you youre a great storyteller. You keep a journal. Ever since childhood, youve kept a book on your nightstand.

From the corner office to the crummy cubicle, there are lots of us out there: creative writers who hold down a day job. Its not that writing isnt our job. Its just that the day job and the writing feed separate, but equally important, parts of us.

We often draw inspiration from our longtime favorite authors. One of my favorite contemporary novelists, Olaf Olafsson who wrote Absolution (Pantheon, 1994), The Journey Home (Pantheon, 2000), Walking Into the Night (Pantheon, 2003), and Valentines (Pantheon, 2007), is executive vice president of Time Warner.

In his author biography at Bookbrowse.com, Olafsson describes his dual life as an executive vice president and as a writer:

It still amazes me sometimes that I actually stumbled into the world of business. I dont think I ever intended to. Growing up, I envisioned businessmen as being rather dull, manipulative old blokes, smoking a cigar and making pronouncements, usually not very smart. So much for that. I enjoy working with people in building businesses, putting ideas into motionits a bit like starting with a blank piece of paper. Writing on the other hand is a basic need. If I dont write, Im not content. Its pretty simple.

Writing really is about being content. In his book On Writing, Stephen King said that writing is all about getting happy. Writing is never a hobby. Neither is it a dilettante activity for which we salvage some leftover time from our otherwise busy days. Writing feeds those days. On the days when I dont write, I underperform as an employee and as a human being.

In fact, I think my boss or the U.S. government should pay me for the time I spend at home with my morning coffee and my journal. Thatnot the conference-room pep talksmakes me a happier, more focused employee.

I write. Therefore I work. Simple as that.

Last winter, this manlets call him Johnarrived at one of my Saturday-morning creative writing classes with a completed first draft of a novel.

John had a wife, a child, and a mortgage. He also had a high-pressure job in a U.S. corporation.

Every day during his office lunch hour, John took his laptop and his iPod and sat in his car eating a sandwich and writing the next few pages of his book. Five days a week. Chapter by chapter. After a year, he had his first draft.

John got two things right. First, he set himself a writing schedule and stuck with it. Second, sitting there in his car in his suit and tie, he ignored that myth of what a creative writer should be.

In America, we hold this ridiculous vision of the writer as a woman dressed in thrift-store black or as a man in the crumpled shirt with an unshaven visage. There they sit, clacking away on their typewriters inside their garret windows, too deep and distracted to tie their own shoes. Its a grand image. Its grand for Hollywoods central casting. But its not grand when you let this vision perch on your shoulders as you sit in your neighborhood bagel shop doing your writingoften on your office lunch hour.

Except for a few best-selling or celebrity authors, most writers work a day (or night) jobeither part or full time as nannies, bartenders, copy editors, or CEOs.