Charles Bukowski worked as a mail carrier and sorter for the post office. He hated his job. Twice he quit and tried making a living through gambling on horses. But track earnings weren’t enough to support his writing career. At 49, he summoned the courage to quit his miserable postal job: I have one of two choices. Stay in the post office and go crazy… or stay out here and play at writer and starve. I have decided to starve.
A literary career can take years to bloom. Not only must a writer find an original voice and style, he or she must endure years of hardship, self-doubt and financial struggle. This entails working long days at odd jobs, coming home exhausted and hungry and somehow finding time to write into the night. This soul-crushing reality inspired Dorothy Parker to suggest the best thing for a young writer is to “shoot them while they’re still happy.”
Job options for struggling writers are often menial and low-paying. Harper Lee worked as a reservations agent for Eastern Airlines. William Faulkner toiled at 12-hour shifts in a coal factory. Sci-fi writer Octavia Butler worked as a potato-chip inspector. Margaret Atwood worked as a barista. Detective scribe Raymond Chandler crunched numbers as an oil company accountant. Tom Clancy sold insurance while writing The Hunt for Red October.
Bukowski aptly summed up this dilemma: How in the hell can a person enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?
Many young writers take jobs they find despicable. Twelve-year-old Charles Dickens was forced into work when his father was sent to debtor’s prison. He endured brutal conditions laboring at a boot-blacking factory in London. Franz Kafka suffered “a horrible double life from which there was probably no escape but insanity” while working as an insurance inspector in Prague. William Burroughs killed roaches, bedbugs and rats while working as an exterminator.
Henry Miller’s greatest fear was wasting his life in some senseless humdrum job. But he had a wife and young child to support. He took a job as employment manager for the Western Union Telegraph Company. His duties were to hire and fire “desperate men who came to him for work with anguish on their faces.”
Writers often turn to teaching to stay alive. Stephen King taught high school English while writing short stories for literary magazines. Paul Bowles taught literature at Los Angeles Valley College. David Foster Wallace created a highly-touted writing class at Pomona College. Aldous Huxley taught French at Eton College (one of his students was George Orwell).
The problem with becoming a writing instructor is that it infiltrates into personal writing time. JRR Tolkien wrote the first lines of The Hobbit while grading English papers at Pembroke College. In a letter to a friend, he confessed “all teaching is exhausting and depressing and one is seldom comforted by knowing when one has had some effect.”
Worse than teaching writing is becoming a writing hack for projects you don’t believe in. While F. Scott Fitzgerald drudged away on early novels, he submitted “inferior short stories” to the Saturday Evening Post. He later admitted, “My trash for the Post grows worse and worse as there is less and less heart in it.”
Fitzgerald moved to Los Angeles to write screenplays for MGM. He was paid $1100 per week, eclipsing the $8000 in royalties he made for his novel The Great Gatsby. He wrote dozens of scripts but only one was made into a movie (Three Comrades). His prime literary years were wasted on projects never made. Director Billy Wilder likened Fitzgerald to “a great sculptor hired to do a plumbing job.’’
Novelist Nathanael West also traded in a promising literary career for Hollywood lucre. West wrote seven “grade-C scripts, dog stories and things for low pay.” He found Los Angeles to be a repulsive land “where dreams go to die.” Though his disillusionment led to his greatest novel The Day of the Locust, it also cost him his life. In 1940, West and his wife died in a car accident in El Centro just south of Los Angeles.
Before becoming an author of children’s books, Roald Dahl wrote violent erotic stories for Playboy. Novelist Rudyard Kipling was paid by the British government to write anti-Indian nationalist stories to justify occupation of India. Norwegian Nobel Prize winning author Knut Hamsun became a Nazi sympathizer and wrote pro-German articles for Hitler.
It’s common for young writers to transmute their awful jobs into novels. Charles Bukowski’s days as a postal clerk inspired his debut novel Post Office. Jack Kerouac wrote about his odd jobs as a fruit picker, railroad brakeman, dishwasher and gas station attendant in On the Road. Herman Melville’s time as a 20-year-old sailor on a whaling ship led to Moby Dick. Ken Kesey’s time as a psychiatric hospital aide informed his One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
Many writers hate the writing process itself. James Joyce famously said, “Writing is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives.” Flannery O’Connor wrote, “writing is a terrible experience during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay.” Kurt Vonnegut, who briefly abandoned literature to become a sports writer said, “When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.” The most apt description of writing drudgery comes from Dorothy Parker who said: “I hate writing. I love having written.”
Writing takes discipline, optimism and a tireless work ethic. Early difficulties are an unavoidable rite of passage. Octavia Butler maintained hope by writing positive statements in her journal such as: I shall be a bestselling writer. Each of my books will be on the bestseller lists of LAT, NYT, PA, PW, WP, etc. My novels will go on to the above lists whether publishers push them hard or not…So be it!
Butler became an award-winning science fiction author.
There are no shortcuts. As Charles Bukowski said, “Writers are desperate people. When they stop being desperate, they stop being writers.”