5 Tips on Pursuing Your Writing While Holding Down a 9-to-5 Job
I wrote my first (unpublished) novel when I was in graduate school, between the ages of 23 and 25. During that time, my only real responsibility was to write that book. Time was not a luxury; it could be squandered, ignored, it would renew itself infinitely. I worked hard, but I was still pretty relaxed inside time’s ever-expanding borders.
(5 Tips for Writing Better and Faster.)
Until I wasn’t. And here I’ll share a tale as old as the concept of modern adulthood: I graduated from school, had to get a full-time job as a writer and editor in digital media (I freelanced for a while, but—call me crazy!—I needed healthcare and a steady paycheck), and found myself with a depressing dearth of free time. Whatever free time I did have, I certainly wouldn’t want to spend on writing, as I am one of those writers with a low-grade fear of writing. I know there are a lot of us out there.
But without a regular writing schedule, my life felt pretty empty. Not meaningless, as I did feel fulfilled by the “real” work I was doing, but I was without the more-ness that only comes from living part-time in a fantasy world of your own design.
Several years after graduating and joining the workforce, I was still under the impression that a wealth of time was a prerequisite for writing a book. It wasn’t until the past four years, during which time I wrote and published my debut novel, The Wayside, while holding down a 9-to-5, that I was able to re-teach myself how to write when I wasn’t working. Mostly, this required a shift in the way I conceived of time, and how I used it.
It also may bring you some solace to know that you’re in good company, as it does for me. Frank O’Hara wrote many of his Lunch Poems on his lunch break or in his office at MoMa, where he worked at the information desk. Charles Bukowski and William Faulkner both worked for the post office. Taffy Brodesser-Akner wrote her debut Fleishman Is in Trouble in six months while working as a full-time staff writer for the New York Times. And George Saunders worked as a technical writer at an engineering company and “stole time at his job” for six years until his first short story collection was published. (I’m not specifically recommending that you steal time from your own employer, but I’m also not not doing that.)
Here are some tactics I’ve used to write my book while holding down a 9-to-5, while maintaining a pretty firm handle on my wellbeing/sanity. More than that, I hope these tips can help cultivate a creative life, even if your day job isn’t particularly creative.
1. Work on your draft every day.
Every January 1, the fantasy writer Leigh Bardugo recommits herself to the motto “begin as you mean to go on.” For Bardugo, that means dedicating a small amount of time every day to a goal she’s passionate about pursuing throughout the new year. Emphasis on the phrase “small amount”: In Bardugo’s estimation, you only need to carve out 15 minutes a day to spend on your project. You do not need to take yourself on a month-long retreat (or enroll in a two-year graduate program, for that matter) to achieve your creative goals.
I came across that piece of advice this past new year. At that time, edits on The Wayside were finished, and I felt that chattering creativity fairy nudging me toward my next project: a messy partial draft of a novel I’d begun before I wrote The Wayside and hadn’t revisited in over three years.
At that time, too, my 9-to-5 was feeling more like an 8-to-7. My day job demanded all of my working hours and most of my energy. Even though I loved the work I was doing, I had no bandwidth to devote to my novel when I signed off from work in the evenings. I was locked in a cycle of wanting to write, not having the time I thought I needed to write, and feeling bad about myself for lacking the discipline to align the two.
And then I came across Bardugo’s post (which has evolved into the #BAYMTGO movement on social media), and everything clicked.
One thing I’ve always known about myself is that I am a morning person. Those quiet hours before my Slack pings and my inbox stacks up is when I feel my most creative. That’s when I can lock into the blank page, when I can hear my characters speaking to me. By the end of the day, my head is too filled up with the buzz of work to find the quiet required to write—not to mention my energy tank is at zero, and frankly, I’m not interested in filling it back up again.
Bardugo’s advice reframed my expectations around the time required to write. Instead of agonizing over when I could plan a two week-long solo writer’s retreat, I simply started to set my morning alarm 30 minutes earlier than usual. By stealing that extra time, I can spend a few minutes meditating and then write for at least 15 minutes. If I don’t want to stop at 15 minutes, then I don’t. If it’s one of those days when the force is nowhere to be found, then I do. Now, in August, I have a bit over 200 pages of a draft I’m pretty happy with, just by getting my hands on it a little bit every day.
2. Treat everything as material.
As Nora Ephron said, “everything is copy.” Even if you’re in a job that has nothing whatsoever to do with your creative work, I guarantee some elements of your workplace can make their way into your writing, whether that’s the unique way a coworker dresses or a client’s *particular* demands that evoke in you a *particular* emotional response.
One privilege of being a writer is that no experience is ever boring, never a waste of time—not when we get to observe, absorb, and translate all of that seemingly insignificant stuff into art. And if your writing project is top of mind, you’ll always find ways to feed it. Something to remember the next time your manager asks if you can deliver a new cut incorporating the notes that the client just sent over within the next hour, please.
3. When you can’t find time to write, read.
You can’t be a writer unless you’re a reader. For young writers especially, I always advise that you read even more than you write—reading voraciously and attempting to mimic the writers I admired was integral to developing my style early on in my writing life. But I think that holds true regardless of where you are in your writing career. What’s more motivating than reading a book you wish you’d written yourself?
And try as I might to write every single day of the week, realistically my work schedule necessitates that I skip a couple of days here and there. On those days especially, I treat reading as an extension of my writing. I always have three-ish books going at once: one that I read for pleasure (I’m looking at you, romantasy), another that I read for education, and another that I think will be instructive to my own work in some way, whether that’s in terms of subject matter or the writer’s style. On no-writing days, I focus my attention on the latter, so that the next day I’m even more inspired to get back to my draft.
The same 15-minute rule can apply to reading, too. On those days you’re slammed with work, consider reading a short story on your lunch break or listening to an audiobook on your commute. The voices of those writers will echo in your head even as you get back to delivering that expense report.
4. Create boundaries around your time.
When I was writing my first book, I became obsessed with learning about the daily routines and rituals of great writers. (If you haven’t already, I urge you to read Ursula K. Le Guin’s. It’s legendary.) I think I was looking for a hack to writing well and painlessly, some magic formula that I could recreate and self-administer and thus would my own great work appear out of the bubbling cauldron of creation.
Of course, none of those schedules ever worked for me. Not as a grad school student with more time than I knew what to do with, and certainly not as a person with a day job.
The only “hack” that I’ve managed to drum up is to understand your own daily rhythms and manufacture a routine around them. What time of day do you focus best? What does it take to clear your mind? Whatever and whenever that is, block out that time in your schedule and guard it militantly. That’s how you get yourself to sit down and do the work.
This means saying no to a lot of things, which in some ways requires even more discipline than it does to write. This is a matter of prioritizing, of choosing what makes you feel the most aligned to your passion. Given the option, I would probably choose to do literally anything other than write on the weekends. But when I’m deep in creation mode, I have to find the wherewithal to protect my time. In the end, it always feels better to write than not to write.
It also helps to find a routine or an activity that establishes a clear separation between “work mode” and “creation mode.” For me, that’s practicing yoga after I finish writing and before opening up my work laptop in the mornings. For you, that might mean taking your dog out for a walk, or lighting a candle and putting on your special writing sweats once the baby is finally down. (A little bit of superstition can go a long way.)
5. Make time to rest.
Burnout is real. Yes, you have to write a lot of bad stuff to get to the good stuff—that’s one of the more annoying parts of the process—but if you’re writing quote-unquote badly and also dreading every second of it, that probably means one of two things: You’re not working on a project you actually like, or you’re overextending yourself. You owe it to yourself, and to your project, to rest.
Recently, I spoke with the cofounder and CEO of the company I work for about my secret writing life, and how, over the years, I’ve struggled to find the “work-creativity” balance that fills me up rather than drains me. (I’m lucky enough to work for a company with very cool founders and CEOs.)
Her advice? We are all only one person, and we all have a million hats to wear. It’s literally not possible to wear all of those hats at once (unless we’re pulling a Joey wearing all of Chandler’s clothes kind of thing, which is generally inadvisable).
Our job, she said, is to decide which of those hats we need—or want—to wear on any given day. We can stash the others in the closet and pull them out another time. What she said to me was so simple, but it gave me the permission I needed to give myself some grace, to release the expectation that I can be all things at all times.
So if your nerves are frayed and your writing project is becoming just one more burden to shoulder, give yourself some time back. Drop the writing routine for a bit, say yes to after-work drinks with your coworkers, read purely for pleasure. Do whatever you need to do to fill yourself back up again, and you’ll come back to your project feeling energized, excited, and grateful that you get to do this magical thing in addition to your “regular” work.
Check out Caroline Wolff’s The Wayside here:
(WD uses affiliate links)