One Thing (Almost) Every Aspiring Writer Needs
I'm regularly asked what advice I have for newbie writers, and I usually say stuff about trying to find community by joining a writing group, going to workshops, reading at open mics, posting online, etc. I might talk about various strategies for building an audience even if you're not traditionally published, and maybe I'll mention something about finding a routine that works for you, whether you write every day or once a week, or whatever.
But there's one thing I don't talk about enough, which I think is pretty essential to most aspiring writers: You need a good day job.
Writing is not going to pay the rent at first -- and it may never generate enough income to live on, even if you become successful. So unless you have a trust fund, a big nest egg, or a partner with a well-paying job, you'll need some other source of income. And the kind of day job you have can make all the difference in your writing life.
I learned this the hard way: I wasn't able to start writing fiction seriously, finishing stories regularly and sending them out for publication, until I found a day job that gave me both time and mental energy for writing. I honestly don't think I'd have made it as far as I have without that day job.
Back in the day, I was working at a newspaper, on the health care beat, and I came home every day feeling half dead. I would want to sit down and do writing, but my brain literally could not conjure any words at all. Part of the problem was that I had a long, stressful commute to and from work, and often we would have to work late or attend meetings in the evenings. But also, my boss was an abusive jerk who would single out one of my coworkers for lavish praise and then tear the rest of his reporters apart. And we were expected to produce a ton of journalism, ideally breaking news, every single day. It was a bloody brutal job. I lasted a whole year.
When I left that job, I was feeling utterly demoralized, and felt like a total failure. But my next job was great: I was still writing about healthcare, but it was for a B2B newsletter company, where I spent more time writing about legal compliance and Medicare policy issues, which were actually super fun to delve into. The topics I covered were endlessly fascinating to geek out about, and every day I learned something new about the byzantine world of health policy. (I used to be able to talk your ear off about the Stark Self-Referral Law, which I swear has nothing to do with Iron Man talking about himself in the third person.)
Part of what made that job so perfect was that I was more assertive than usual -- maybe because I had just escaped from an abusive situation. When I started at the newsletter company, there were only four or five employees, total, and the founder was extremely hands-on. (We'll call him Bill.) Bill tended to show up at work at six A.M. and stay until late at night, and sometimes he would just sleep on the floor of his office. Bill encouraged all his employees to work similarly long hours, and some of them did. (At one point, Bill said to me, "Do you work to live? Or live to work?")
I looked Bill in the eye and told my boss that I would work exactly forty hours a week in that job, and he would have my full attention and commitment for those forty hours.
One of my coworkers, whom we'll call Jeff, was working at least twelve hours a day. He scolded me, saying I would never move up in the organization if I wasn't fully committed. To which I replied that there were only five employees, so there wasn't really much of an organization to move up in. (Jeff later did get into a middle-management position at the company, after it had expanded a lot. But after a year or two, Bill asked Jeff to go back to being a writer, because the company needed writers a lot more than it needed managers. Jeff refused to take what he saw as a demotion, and ended up being fired.)
Eventually, Bill let me work from home one or two days a week, and when I moved to another city, he let me work from home full time. I made sure that when I worked from home, everyone knew I was being productive and continuing to geek out about policy and politics -- though by now I was writing about banking compliance. I never gave anyone cause to think I wasn't fully committed. But after I'd worked at the company for about five years, I had lunch with Bill, and he said to me, "I know this job isn't really taking forty hours a week for you anymore, but you're doing a great job, so I don't care."
This wasn't just a great day job because I was able to work sane hours, and eventually work from home and skip the commute. It was also super interesting without being too stressful. I spent my days interviewing policy wonks, attorneys, health providers and banking experts about laws and regulations, and there were many days that I was like, "I can't believe I get paid to do this." It kept my brain activated without draining all the life out of me.
At this point, I feel as though I'm boasting. I fully recognize how lucky I was to have that job, which allowed me to work on fiction almost every day and also volunteer for various queer publications and organizations. But even if you can't find a job like that one, I think there are some principles that you can apply to the search for a good day job.
So yeah, you don't want to be working inhumane hours, or dealing with undue stress. Stress is the mind-fucker. You also don't want to be bored out of your mind, though having had some boring jobs, I'd say it's better for writing than interesting-but-high-pressure. I didn't mention the importance of a friendly workplace above, but that definitely helps -- everyone at the newsletter company was chill and nice, except maybe for poor Jeff.
The truth is, of course, most jobs suck. Capitalism and the relentless pursuit of efficiency and productivity have put the squeeze on all of us. I'm far from the first person to say that not long ago, you could have a chill part-time job, live with roommates, and pay a fairly low rent, before our current housing nightmare. (The causes and solutions for the housing crisis are beyond the scope of this newsletter, but it's my personal belief that if we taxed the rich appropriately and regulated private equity, it would definitely help. So would investing in better urban transit including fewer cars, plus a massive investment in affordable housing. But that's just my opinion.)
I feel like the ideal day job is one where nobody understands exactly what you do, so they can't try to micromanage you. You get to immerse yourself happily in some arcane topic, and when bosses show up to mess with you, you can just rattle off some trivia about the government's inherent reasonableness authority. I also know writers who've worked for arts organizations or other non-profits, who've seemed to have a decent work/life balance that let them create in their spare time. For a while, half the writers I knew were working at Amoeba Records in SF, until the pandemic decimated their jobs -- but I can say from experience that some retail jobs are too stressful to leave you energy for writing. It really depends.
Probably the perfect day job is different for every individual, so you should just find the right day job for you. An important first step is to think of it as a day job, rather than as the thing you're going to pour your heart and soul into. You're going to give an appropriate amount of dedication to this gig, commensurate with what you're getting paid. If a job is siphoning away your soul, especially if it's not particularly fun, follow my example and move on. Set reasonable expectations at your job and don't let them exploit you too much.
I talked at the start of this newsletter about finding a writing routine, and I do think that's important. I got a nasty reminder in 2020, in fact -- my routine was shot to hell because it revolved around writing in cafes. "Write every day" is terrible advice for a lot of people, but the soul of that advice is "find a way to make writing a habit, something you just do without having to psych yourself up too, too much each time."
Before I had that abusive newspaper job, I had already made an attempt to write fiction seriously, but I was broke and demoralized a lot of the time. I had a string of temp jobs that were the wrong combination of boring and stressful, interspersed with some bad retail work. During the times when I had no job, I would try to write fiction, but psyching myself up was a major hurdle, and I would frequently end up playing Duke Nukem instead. I produced a smattering of very weird fiction about an interplanetary insurance investigator whose fake pregnant stomach contained a murderous cyborg, but hardly ever finished a story. It wasn't that I didn't have time to write, I just hadn't found a way to make writing a practice.
It took that newsletter job, with its predictable hours and its low-anxiety work, to get me to a place where I could dedicate time and energy to writing.
I quit that newsletter job to go work at io9, which was also a tough adjustment. The first four or five months of working on the site, I didn't have time for my own creative writing at all. But then I got right back into it, because the years of the newsletter job had built up my writing practice, almost like a muscle that I'd strengthened. Sitting down in a cafe and working on a piece of fiction felt like second nature by that point -- so even though io9 was more stressful and involved longer hours, I still managed to make it work.
And that's the thing: a really good day job is like training wheels. It gives you the space and mental energy to focus on writing, until writing becomes second nature, and eventually you can keep writing even if your professional life becomes more intense and demanding. That's my experience, anyway.
So really, corporations that boast about being patrons of the arts should focus on creating a ton of mellow, low-key-but-interesting positions for the aspiring artists of tomorrow. Right?
Something I Love Right Now
I finally got around to watching A League of Their Own, the TV adaptation of the Penny Marshall film about a women's baseball team in the 1940s. There's no Madonna, as far as I know (maybe she has a cameo as a wily hot dog vendor and I missed her) but this show is still compulsive viewing. It's your classic underdog sports story, with the requisite share of setbacks, nail-biting games and fist-pumping triumphs -- but also a really fascinating look at women's roles eighty years ago, which manages to be profoundly feminist without ever smacking you over the head. And because it's a product of the early 2020s, it deals frankly with both queerness and race: there are multiple lesbian or bisexual characters, and one of the main storylines is about Maxine "Max" Chapman, a Black pitcher, trying to win a spot as a pro baseball player in spite of all the barriers thrown in her way. I'm seriously blown away.
My Stuff
This Saturday, I'm going to be at the San Diego Union-Tribune Festival of Books! I'll be on a panel called "Worlds of Wonder" at noon, on the UCSD campus, with a signing afterwards. Please come say hi.
Over at them.us, I wrote about why we need actual trans characters, instead of just metaphors for transness. "Trans people exist. We don’t need to be allegories or symbols, we can just be... people. At such a precarious time for our rights, it's more important than ever to see ourselves in all our flawed complexity, rather than just catching glimpses through a veil of symbolism."
Lately I get a lot of deja vu, because I keep having the same conversation with people I know. I'll mention my gig at the Washington Post, or the Marvel stuff, and they'll say, "I had no idea you were doing that." Makes me wish there was some way I could tell all my peeps what I've been up to, once and for all. So here goes...
I'm the monthly science fiction and fantasy book reviewer for the Washington Post. You can read all my columns here, and there should be a new one in the next few days.
I wrote a young adult trilogy, and the final book (Promises Stronger Than Darkness) came out in April. It's basically the gayest shit ever, featuring a team of outrageous queers saving all of the worlds with the power of creativity and getting each other's pronouns right.
I co-created a trans superhero for Marvel. Escapade made her debut in the 2022 pride issue, and then I wrote her in New Mutants Vol. 4 and New Mutants: Lethal Legion (pre-order). Shela Sexton is a trickster and thief who has the power to trade places with anyone, and her best friend is a dapper transmasc enby named Morgan. They also have a flying turtle named Hibbert, and Shela has a complicated relationship with Cerebella, who used to be a brain in a globe.
I'm still doing the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct with Annalee Newitz, all about the meaning of science fiction, science and futurism. Lately we've done some episodes about how Silicon Valley deliberately misinterprets the science fiction stories they claim to love. (Subscribe here.)
I'm still very proud of Never Say You Can't Survive, the book I wrote about using creative writing to get through tough times. And my short story collection, Even Greater Mistakes.
So I'm keeping busy despite no longer having a day job! What have you been up to lately?