The inside and the outside

On the three jobs writers have to do and what each one requires.

It’s no great insight to say that writers actually have three jobs despite appearing to only have one:

1. To write.

2. To have written, aka to publish—to perform the role of the human person who completed the first job; to participate in and possibly to increase the likelihood that your writing will reach readers and “succeed” within capitalism.

3. Whatever else you do to make money and to continue to have a body and mind that can do the first two jobs.

(Many writers also have a fourth job—things like being an editor for a literary magazine, or volunteering as a writing mentor, or running a reading series—something they do for little to no money because they love it, and feel they can make a contribution to their neighborhood or to the broader literary community through doing it; until recently my fourth job was running Blue Stoop, a Home for Philly Writers, where I am still a board member).

For the first job, I need one desk, one chair, one computer, some mental space and quiet, to eat some good meals and sleep some good hours and read some good words and drink water and maybe go on a small walk and to not touch my inbox until after 1pm each day. For the second job, I need one computer, one phone, one agent, many publishing professionals, many friends, at least three social media platforms, and to be talking to other people—real and possible—for many hours a day. These days, since I’ve put teaching writing at a university in that third job spot, I need a pen, a printer, chalk, a blackboard (I love drawing diagrams!), a car, my hands, and the rest of my body.

What’s odd, I’m thinking now, is that the first job is so profoundly inside-facing, and the second two jobs are so non-negotiably outside-facing. No wonder I feel a sense of constant whiplash trying to do all three in a single week, let alone a single day. Good writing requires unknowing. Selling yourself as a writer and teaching writing rewards knowing. Which am I then? Do I know or do I not?

On a good day, I don’t mind the second job as much as some people do—I’m naturally chatty, nosy, and a social yenta—or the third one—my students are smart and generous, reading and commenting on their work often makes me cry and teaches me things about writing.

But still, I’m sitting with the truth that, on some fundamental level, I don’t want, and never trained for, two of the three jobs I have. As a kid, when I said, I want to be a writer, I meant I wanted to do that first job. I did not know that the second and third jobs were the first jobs’ necessary companions. This is not a wail, but a simple truth, and an odd truth about the particular kind of work I—and maybe you—have chosen.

There is so much about writing that I now know that I never wanted to know.

From teaching: how dialogue helps because it gives the reader a chance to make real someone else who is not the narrator, how rendering an action with a subject and a verb instead of describing the action with an adjective takes the story out of the mediated voice of reading and returns it to the clear voice of living. How the kinds of academic labor that are rewarded with money and job security often have very little to do with learning. How what is said in a meeting with any person who has a stake in perpetuating the survival of a university is nearly never what is meant.

From publishing: how many of the things we think are earned or miraculously bestowed upon works of art by critics and prize committees and readers because the work is good are actually commodities that have been bought and paid for. That many beautiful, worthy books are never seen or held because they have been deemed not materially profitable and the reverse: that many books lacking in beauty and literary merit are read and held every day.

Like I said, on a good day I hold all three jobs warmly and loosely and am grateful. But fewer and fewer days have been good in this way, lately, it seems. I feel exhausted—as in “resources or reserves completely used up, consumed, depleted, finished, at an end”—and ungenerous. I want to know why they’re not doing it right the first time and what I can get in return and why it is all worth my while.

“Don’t be bitter, I said. It’s never too late,” writes Grace Paley in my literal favorite short story ever, “Wants.” “No, he said with a great deal of bitterness,” the narrator’s husband responds. It’s me! I think. I am a Great Deal of Bitterness.

Lately, I’ve gone looking for things that might help me make sense of my three jobs and how to do all three, forever. There’s less written about the second job that substantively grapples with the luck and strangeness of getting to/having to sell a branded version of your writing back to the world (though if you know of something please leave it in the comments!) likely because it’s so private and vulnerable and it changes all the time with changing technology, so I’ve been thinking and reading more about job number three: teaching writing.

I re-read George Saunders’ essay “My Writing Education: A Time Line,” because I remember it made me cry the first time around, and sure enough it makes me cry this time around too. I linger over this part of the essay,

I am teaching at Syracuse myself now. Toby, Arthur Flowers, and I are reading that year’s admissions materials. Toby reads every page of every story in every application, even the ones we are almost certainly rejecting, and never fails to find a nice moment, even when it occurs on the last page of the last story of a doomed application. “Remember that beautiful description of a sailboat on around page 29 of the third piece?” he’ll say. And Arthur and I will say: “Uh, yeah … that was … a really cool sailboat.” Toby has a kind of photographic memory re stories, and such a love for the form that goodness, no matter where it’s found or what it’s surrounded by, seems to excite his enthusiasm. Again, that same lesson: good teaching is grounded in generosity of spirit.

And there it is, precisely what I feel I don’t have these days, which tells me nothing about how to get it back, but at least confirms my sense that I am onto something important by noting as a problem that I don’t have it. Thinking this makes me remember people who taught me, in high school and college but mostly in my MFA program who also did not have this generosity of spirit and how much it hurt to be on the receiving end of their bitterness. “This is exhaustive and exhausting,” one of them wrote to me in a series of words that I’ve never, ever, forgotten. And also, I see now: the person who wrote that was doing a job that he didn’t want and had never trained for.

Later in the essay, Saunders describes a revelation he had while hearing “Toby” Wolff read Chekhov aloud.

All of those things I’ve been learning about in class, those bone-chilling abstractions theme, plot, and symbol are de-abstracted by hearing Toby read Chekhov aloud: they are simply tools with which to make your audience feel more deeply—methods of creating higher-order meaning. The stories and Toby’s reading of them convey a notion new to me, or one which, in the somber cathedral of academia, I’d forgotten: literature is a form of fondness-for-life. It is love for life taking verbal form.

Fondness for life. Love for life. Sure, OK. It’s not clear what George’s role at Syracuse was at that time—Adjunct Lecturer (what I was for years and might be again)? Visiting Assistant Professor (what I am now)?—but it is certain that lovely Toby and generous Arthur Flowers were tenured or tenure-track professors. How much easier it is to be generous when you’re not stressing over your material and physical survival!

But George is also not wrong, and fondness for life is a thing I once had more of than I do now. What happened? The pandemic? Publishing my first book? Both? (They happened at almost exactly the same time).

Today, I do want more fondness for life. I want it in my teaching and I want it in my writing, for that may be one way in which my first job and my third job demand similar kinds of knowing, and similar kinds of love.

I’m not sure if it is because of spring or what, but all of a sudden these parts of myself that remember fondness and remember wanting are waking up. I’m planning trips and a space is opening up within me to think about all of the elements in a writing life and how they might be made to work together more fondly and less bitterly, with more kinds of knowing that feed each other and feed me rather than fight each other and exhaust and deplete me.

I don’t have all the answers. How do you stay fond for life while doing your three (or more) jobs? Are there any of these jobs that you didn’t know you wanted but now kind of want or enjoy? Are there any you felt sure you wanted and now no longer want? Let me know in the comments.

In the mean time, here’s the end of Paley’s (not coincidentally, she taught George Saunders’ how to write) story “Wants”:

I want, for instance, to be a different person. I want to be the woman who brings these two books back in two weeks. I want to be the effective citizen who changes the school system and addresses the Board of Estimate on the troubles of this dear urban center.

I had promised my children to end the war before they grew up.

I wanted to have been married forever to one person, my ex-husband or my present one. Either has enough character for a whole life, which as it turns out is really not such a long time. You couldn’t exhaust either man’s qualities or get under the rock of his reasons in one short life.

Just this morning I looked out the window to watch the street for a while and saw that the little sycamores the city had dreamily planted a couple of years before the kids were born had come that day to the prime of their lives.

Well! I decided to bring those two books back to the library. Which proves that when a person or an event comes along to jolt or appraise me I can take some appropriate action, although I am better known for my hospitable remarks.

Yours, fondly,

Emma