I think there are three ways of earning money in this world. One is to rent out your body (labor), another is to rent out the space between your ears (desk jobs mostly), and the third is to have money to spend on something that earns more money (investment). I have no experience with the third, only the first two.
I work as a teacher now. I rent out the space between my ears, but I’ve had lots of jobs working as a laborer. Whereas the hazards of working as a laborer were sore muscles and not feeling intelligent or being seen as intelligent, the hazards now are that my brain gets a bit overcrowded sometimes. It gets overcrowded because I use it, not just for my income producing work, but also for my writing. Writing, for me, requires a sort of emptiness. It requires space for feeling out a story, for the subconscious to mull, for the muse, and this is made harder by the fact that the space between my ears is not always my own.
I have a lot of narratives running through my head. My students’ novels in progress and memoirs in progress, short stories, essays – all kinds of stories that don’t actually belong to me, but to which I apply what I know about writing. I try to help with craft, but I also bring to the narratives my intuition.
This morning I lay in bed and counted up the number of jobs I’ve had. Including babysitting when a teenager and a paper route when even younger, I’ve worked over 25 jobs. There were times that I hated the work I was doing, times when I was sure that I was better than this, whatever this was: scrubbing toilets, serving food, dipping ice cream, milking cows, delivering bread. Whatever it was, I felt certain that I was above it. Only I wasn’t, and I’m not now. The thing is, I wasn’t just judging myself at the time, I was also judging the work. I judged the work to be not good enough for me. I was sure I was too smart for slinging hash, or banging nails, or chasing other people’s pubic hairs down drains. I was just wrong, dead wrong. No one is too smart for anything.
I say this because I think it’s important to respect all work. I didn’t respect the work I was doing when I was doing it. Even as it benefited me, I did not recognize that. When I cleaned houses for a living I did not realize that my work supported me in more ways than one. In fact, except for the fact that I had to do some pretty back-breaking labor, it was luxurious. I had every day alone. The stories and novels I worked on during that time had all of my attention because the work that I did required so little from the space between my ears.
I also see how much the work I did simply to pay the bills has given me a rich trunk-full of experiences to draw from while writing. The experiences I racked up from my 25-plus jobs are experiences now in a database to draw from when writing fiction. I know first hand the feel of washing a cow’s udders as the mud and shit flake away under my fingers. I know what it is to stand behind a cash register eight hours a day and feel the ache in my feet. I know what it is to be a waitress, a bartender, a baker, a maid, an exercise instructor, a carpenter, a paper deliverer, even an assistant drum-maker. I’m profoundly grateful now for all these experiences. I’m so glad I wasn’t “too smart” for these jobs. They’ve made me a a better person, a more thoughtful person, and possibly a better writer too.