Of course, being a writer, one must write, right? If not for this, where would these and other academic professionals in the field be? Certainly not teaching, so it's by no means a stretch to say a writer must write. Yet unlike doctors, lawyers, electricians, baristas and etc., it isn't writing that earns these and so many other writers their paychecks. They earn their salaries thanks to teaching, and so in a way, writing becomes more of an avocation in the short term. Of course, saying this to a writer must invite all sorts of passionate invectives. How dare I say this? Well, the emphasis is on the short term because writing is a process with long-term (even extremely long-term) benefits, which is a long about way to say that writing isn't earning your daily bread, my friend. Unlike the doctor who performs the surgery, the lawyer who closes the case, or the electrician who connects your power supply, writers overwhelmingly must rely upon something else in order to pay bills, and so what they invest their passion into becomes a side job, one that requires much more time and effort than the day job.
...which brings this blog to my situation. I certainly don't survive off of my writing. I've got to get up five days a week and pull shifts at a coffee shop that sometimes come very close to breaking my spirit. Sometimes, I look at what my future could be, and it takes a bit of effort to turn away from something that often seems to approach despair-- or if not despair, certainly annoyance, or impatience, or moody silence, or etc. Does this change anything? No. I still have to go to work and pull that check because, like it or not, the only thing I can rely upon these days are those bills showing up in my mailbox.
Point is: like Percy discusses in his essay, work is central to our lives, and by work, I mean the job. Sure, I love writing, reading, waxing philosophic, etc., and these are certainly present in my day-to-day life, as well, but often I don't do one or the other of these daily. I have that luxury should I choose it. Work is work, and it's something that needs to be done roughly five days a week. You've got to eat, you need shelter: you need to work. So it's no surprise that the way we look at the world we live in is shaped by what we do to make that money. Overall, I'm not the most social creature around, and so working in a customer-oriented industry really plays with my mind in interesting ways (from the writer's perspective). Percy stresses to his readers the importance of playing this up in our fiction because no matter what we're doing, who we are as workers paints our experience and our reactions to this experience even outside of the workplace.
Beyond the page, though, how you work and what you've got to do really plays into your development/evolution as a writer. I work hard, and I do things other people are unwilling to do because I want my job security ensured in this economy. When I'm home, though, I think about how much I'd like to really push into my field so that the work I do now can be left in the past a.s.a.p. Culling these emotions from my working experience, it makes me sit my ass down at the computer and work. Once again, it's work playing into my future and my goals. Call it vocation affecting avocation, which certainly describes the function of my writing at this stage.
Anyway, I'll have plenty more to say about work in the future. I just thought I'd post a few preliminary thoughts today.
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