Working in a bookshop is definitely a good companion job because it gives you the opportunity to see the way people interact with books, gives you a sense of books as a marketable commodity (something some writers think of as kinda dirty, but I think it keeps it all real too) and you get discounts!! In bigger bookshops there’s the chance to move into more interesting specialist roles like children’s bookseller or buyer. You won’t make a huge amount of money, but I personally
think a bit of poverty helps motivate me to write!!

I know quite a few professional artists (the writers I know well are lucky enough to live off their writing or grants or husbands – my husband lives off me!!). A friend of mine is a postie and he’s finished by 1-3pm most days. He’s on a little motorbike, though we have bicycle posties round her too – I think that would be a good match. Another friend of mine does life modelling (yes in the rudey nudey) and teaches yoga part time. Another does more life modelling and runs a few drawing classes of her own through a local community centre and makes the rest of her living doing professional illustration. I guess it’s being creative and flexible about your approach to working.

Jobs I think I would like to do for a day: real estate agent (I love walking round other people’s houses), book indexer (sounds soothingly ordered), travel agent (for the discounts), academic, curator of ancient relics (I want to be alone in a museum, and again with the soothingly ordered), book reviewer, teacher (because kids and teenagers are so interesting)…

I don’t know anyone who lives as a practicing artist who makes much money from their dayjob. If you want that kind of flexibility and you’re not really looking for a career, if you don’t want to take work home etc…then probably you won’t get paid much. SO you have to write harder!

Worst job was advertising copywriter. The last thing I wanted to do when I came home was write fiction after using words to manipulate people for marketing purposes all day. I think it was just the fact that I was ambivalent about working in marketing that got me down, though, because working full-time at a magazine doesn’t seem to hurt my fiction writing. Producing fiction and non-fiction seem to come from different parts of my brain.

So I guess there’s no True Ideal Writer Day Job; what works for me won’t necessarily work for you, just find what does.

oddly enough, i find i get more writing done during the school year than i do during vacations. i have a set routine of going into school early and writing before work starts–vacation is all hectic, no schedule and lots of sleeping in!

oh, and the good thing about being a library media specialist in comparison to a teacher is that the take-home work is reading, and that works out perfectly since i write YA fiction.

It has pretty nice hours, doesn’t often require homework or on-call work, and gives me the opportunity to chat with lots of people throughout the day. I get social contact to counter the solitude of writing, and I get lots of vocal cadences and manners of speaking to work with. Also, it’s been helpful to me in getting sensory detail into my stories–you’d be surprised what you can guess about a person sight-unseen on the phone.

pre-academia days, my main source of sustenance was temping. i know it’s not for everyone, but i really thrived on doing office work. it taught me a lot of skills i find quite useful as a writer & professor (technical stuff to do with transcribing and typing and editing documents, but more generally with working steadily & responsibly & pushing projects through to completion etc.). temping is awful if you’re only getting short-term assignments and have to find your way to a new evil office building every day and learn the ropes. but if you’re reasonably sensible and competent you do a bit of that and then you get a longer-term assignment that often isn’t really very onerous, and it’s pretty great. paid my way through senior year of college with a really cushy 30-hour-a-week gig at an engineering firm in cambridge, most of the time i could really just sit there and read, it was quite decadent & paid for all rent and living expenses!

i had a year of real day-jobbing it before i went to grad school, it was the perfect day job but i say that only with the caveat that i was bored out of my mind & realized i’m not the day-job type! it was a half-time administrative position in an academic department at a medical school, and it came with full health and other benefits (including library privileges at the university & taking a class or two for free).

and in fact for usians this really is what i recommend. you need to have health insurance! not so much for regular stuff, but one broken limb and you could be tens of thousands of dollars in the hole. it’s just not responsible not to have it, you at least need some kind of catastrophic coverage even if it’s with a very high multi-thousand-dollar deductible. so if you can find a 20-30-hour a week job that comes with benefits (and that provides enough money to supply rent and bare minimum living expenses), you’re in some ways better off even than working freelance for much higher hourly rates.

one more thing: when you are young and starting out it really is pretty hard to get enough money! i remember the days (they lasted till pretty recently in fact!) of being totally broke. but as you go further along in your work life & things start coming together, time really comes to have a premium on it. so don’t be regretful if you’re young and poor, just really carve out the time to write now & you’ll be glad of it later, you’re developing good habits but also really this is the time to read a lot and properly learn what you’re doing to prepare for the next stage of life when there will likely be many more sorts of demands on your time! (i.e. children if you want em, or work demands as you advance in a profession, or what have you.)

i really like diana’s list. it was my list, too, and why i picked the job. i think making writing work with a job is a matter of making it work. but the list helps.

Also work as a mentor – kinda like teaching but no responsibility (& can walk away). Having said that, hard to write ‘big’ words (more than three letters) after a day of basic phonics/numeracy etc.

Other jobs been library work – working in document delivery/interlibrary loans at a uni certainly had a lot of perks and exposure to books from all walks of life.

Justine the whole academia v non-academia writing is an issue for me (why I’m avoiding any more…for now). Hard to switch heads. I can always tell when I’ve been doing academic stuff in my creative as the characters (YA) sound like they are reading an essay to the class type deal

but at the same time, they were so specific that they didn’t burn me out for any other kind of writing. and i didn’t exactly bring the issues home. plus, i learned how to write at age level.

Problem is money, because I freelance and often don’t know when the next job will be…

However, getting out into the field is like a holiday after concentrated periods of book writing – even if it does mean dealing with leeches and mud and ticks and lleaking tents and …

I think Ben Peek has said it best. The non 9 to 5 kind is best, where you can dovetail writing and the “real” job together to suit yourself.

my current day-job is pretty much the best one a writer can have. i work at the australian centre for youth literature, which means it is my job to stay in touch with what’s going on in the industry, and i know lots of authors, publishers and (most importantly) librarians personally. i recommend it.

1. Good hours
2. Doesn’t require you to take work home.
3. Something you can “turn off” when you clock out.
4. Good benefits.
5. Not evil. (Evil work is soul draining.)

whatever you do, don’t become a project manager/entrepreneuheur for a succesful web business. this eats all your time. and your braincells. motherhood eats the remaining few.

But since i graduate in december i can see the light at the end of the tunnel and have thrown myself into research so i can read, take in information and just take notes. Then when i graduate I’m going to be a substitute teacher which will give me the time i need to write. It is very much like a temp job because subs get hired on a per day basis, and the responsibility level is fairly low and the hours are fantabulous.

Ha! Me, too.