That's the opening Richard Grayson's autobiographical essay, "A Writer in Spite of Myself." It's a great way to meet this wacky writing role model who has published a bookshelf full of short stories and journalism, using print-on-demand publishing to accent his career.
Welcome to the first installment of my interview with Grayson, part of my deceptively simple feature: Five Easy Questions. In the spirit of Jack Nicholson’s mad piano player, I run a serialized set of weekly interviews with writing pioneers—delivering some practical, unexpected advice about web publishing...
Jason Boog:
You've worn many many hats over the course of your career. How do you balance your writing life and your working life? Any advice for the frazzled writer with a day-job looking for the time and energy to write?
Richard Grayson:
Yeah, I’ve had a multitude of jobs. I’ve taught at nearly twenty colleges, mostly writing classes. I’ve worked as a teacher-trainer in computers in the Miami school system, an English teacher at a Jewish community high school in Phoenix, a staff attorney in social policy at a think tank and director of academic support at a law school...
When I started writing and publishing in the 1970s, I worked as a clerk in a public library, a delivery boy for a florist and a laundry, a messenger for the Village Voice, a cashier at a department store and an assistant editor at the Fiction Collective.
The most prolific time in my recent life was the fall of 2004, when I was often working 10- to 12-hour days as a law school administrator, covering my own job and that of my supervisor on maternity leave, teaching two undergraduate night classes and running my write-in campaign for Congress.
I wrote the weekly diary entries for the McSweeney’s website, produced at least one story a week, and wrote several memoir pieces as well as an article on taking the Florida bar exam.
Of course, I did get pneumonia by mid-December.
On the other hand, I have been “retired” for the past six months and have barely written anything for publication. So I have never seen any correlation between my productivity and having a day job. Like the present, there have been many periods in my life when I had enough income not to work at all, and I didn’t write any more than I did when working full-time at a day job.
Of course, I never had any children to take care of. Raising kids – or caring for someone with Alzheimer’s like my mom – is a lot harder than simply having a day job. Or writing books.
So I really don’t know what to say to frazzled writers with day jobs looking for the time and energy to write. I’ve always written whenever I really wanted to, no matter how hard I worked at other jobs. Getting up at 4 a.m. helps, I guess, but that doesn’t come naturally to a young writer the way it does to an old fart like me.
writing on the train (2 hours a day) has worked pretty well for me.
Posted by: Dan Zarrella | August 21, 2006 7:51 AM | Permalink to Comment