Work-Write Balance
Around the time I completed The Sleepless, I had dinner with a couple of friends at a Greek restaurant in Midtown. I hadn’t seen Daniel and Charles in a long time and I told them, breathless and excited, that I finished a book and was thinking of becoming a full-time writer. Mind, I didn’t have an agent or a book deal, and I hadn’t even revised the manuscript to the extent that it needed. But I was sure; I felt that it was doable. My friends, supportive as ever, resisted the impulse to launch a spit-take of ouzo at my face, and told me not to quit my day job.
I don’t know that I actually would have, even if I had the means or a safety net to do it, but it was a tantalizing prospect. I’ve always romanticized the writerly life, even before I took the steps that made me comfortable to call myself a writer. I imagined that life to be a lot more bohemian than the path that I set myself on—collecting diplomas one after another, and then landing a stable job that allows me to live a life of relative ease. Maybe that’s why I started taking writing seriously; I sure am not the first person to have an early midlife crisis from a sense of middle-class ennui.
This also happened around a time when things at work were a bit difficult. I am an immigration lawyer in private practice, and our firm’s clients are immigrants who are looking for ways to stay in the country and build a better life for themselves. Many of them are in immigration detention, or are on the brink of being put in a plane to be deported. In my mind, all of them deserve to stay here. My job therefore is to make sure that they do—sometimes that’s as straightforward as filing out an application with a government agency. Sometimes, I have to stand in front of a judge, pleading my case with both legal argument and appeals to pity. Most of the time, I have to write—to an ICE attorney, to some bureaucrat, to a federal judge, etc.—listing out all the reasons why my client shouldn’t be kicked out of the land they now call home. On any given day, it’s not an easy gig, and it got much harder during the Trump years. The already uphill battle started to feel impossible, with new arbitrary rules that unfairly stacked the deck against immigrants. That’s truly why part of me wanted to check out.
But I couldn’t have quit my day job just because I had this fantasy about being “a real writer”. The numbers just didn’t allow that. At the time, I was living with my now-husband and he might have been able to support me financially; he’d even expressed willingness to do so, but it would have been a difficult life for both of us, not to mention our furry children. Also, I would have felt very comfortable putting that onus on him just so I can pursue an endeavor I had only started. I wasn’t sure that my writing would pay eventually, if at all. I was just a dabbler then, moved by unrealistic ideas of what the writer’s life is really like.
(To this day, after I’d done some of the necessary groundwork to build a writing career—one that actually generates some sort of income—the numbers still wouldn’t allow me to quit my day job. A typical advance for a speculative fiction novel is roughly an eighth of what I make right now; it wouldn’t even cover rent for a year.)
So of course, I didn’t quit my job. I just kept writing, finding time where I can get it. Still do. The half-hours to and from work can add up to a lot, and so I do a lot of pre-writing on the train. I think about plot points and character names, build a rough outline, that sort of thing. I’m not gonna lie, I also think about my works-in-progress when I’m supposed to be lawyering. If I have a eureka moment, I’d go and type it into my Notes app. Or, if I’m suddenly struck by curiosity I open a private browser tab to look up some obscure trivia that I can use for my book.
After work (which fortunately keeps regular hours), I have dinner and an hour to decompress, then start my writing block. That’s about three hours or so of drafting, researching, revising. During NaNoWriMo, it’s closer to five hours. Weekends I have about twice as much time, but that also means cutting back on seeing friends and family or engaging in other hobbies. I’ve also learned to write anywhere and with any device. With my tablet, at my parent’s kitchen table; with my laptop, at many an airport boarding gate; with my phone, while waiting for my turn at the doctor’s office.
As the business side of writing becomes more relevant to where I am in my career, the task list grows and those blocks of time get split off even further. Is it exhausting? Kind of. One of the big ironies of writing The Sleepless is that it did not ring as true to me until I actually started to write. Now I really get what I was trying to say with the book. The human desire for more time is one of its recurring themes, and boy, does that land extra hard when you’re a writer with a day job.