All writers have had to deal with the question of how to support themselves so they can focus on writing. The top four solutions in history have been:
1) Succeeding commercially enough to be able to support oneself. This is nice work if you can get it, but most writers, even the ones we remember through the ages, have not.
2) Marry well. Also nice work if you can get it, and a few writers, both male and female, have, living of the fortunes of their spouses while turning their attention to writing. Most people don't manage to do this, though, so they have to rely on either option three or option four.
3) Accept a life of penury. Much like those called to religious professions might take vows of poverty, some view writing as a pursuit so serious, it requires limiting the demands of the flesh to the bare minimum.
4) Take on all the normal responsibilities the majority of humans do, and do the best you can to write with the time and energy you have left over after all of that.
As I've mentioned many times on here before, there was a time in my life when I really thought I was going to choose option number three. I wrote a whole personal manifesto in which I determined that lots of people can have kids, but only a few can create lasting art. Based, I guess, on the notion of scarcity, I felt like it was therefore important enough for me to devote myself to writing that it would be okay if I never had kids or found a serious job.
I'm not sure what changed my mind. It might have been going to graduate school and realizing how few people who "did art for a living" I liked. It might have been that I got tired of leaning on family and friends who had real jobs to help me survive. Maybe it was a biological impulse to reproduce reasserting itself after lying dormant. It could have been all of these things. In any event, I quit graduate school with only a Master's and got what for lack of a better term we'll call a "real job." I've been in the "real" economy since. Mrs. Heretic and I had one biological child and adopted another. It's been rewarding in all the ways living a normal life can be. No, I wouldn't trade my kids for a novel people will still be reading a thousand years from now.
Not for lack of trying, but I could never quite shake the need to write. I tried to become a normal person who worried about normal things, but there were two hard facts I couldn't escape: the world didn't make sense, and I felt a need to try to make sense of it. Writing was how I tried. It still is.
A funny thing happened on the way to taking door number four, though. I meant to get the kind of job that would pay the bills and enable me to take care of family but leave me free to reserve most of my mental and emotional energy for life outside of work. That didn't happen. Well, I mean, maybe it did. Some people in my profession do seem to do their nine-to-five and then leave it at the plant. They go home and coach little league or have bowling night or whatever it is normal people do, and they don't think about work when they're not there.
I've never been able to achieve true indifference to work. What I do has seemed important enough to me to deserve my best effort, or at least as close to my best effort as is possible to achieve at work. That's meant spending time on my own to improve my understanding of matters related to work. Mostly, it's meant trying to improve my skills in whatever language I've been translating from, because that was always the core ability I had that would make or break the quality of my output.
I've come home from work, then, and felt the urge to keep on working. But that's not the only impulse I've felt. I also feel the impulse to work on writing, because the universe ain't getting any more comprehensible. And I also feel guilty about not being involved enough in family matters, such as keeping on my son about getting ready for grownup life. Or maybe I feel guilty about how Mrs. Heretic sometimes wants a partner she can sit down and watch television with, but I'm always off trying to fit a full-day's effort on three different things into a single day.
Usually, this all manifests itself in one very mundane, but to me very important, question each day. What do I do with the little bit of time each day I get to call my own? Do I write? If I do, do I write fiction? Do I write for this blog? If not writing, then I should read? If so, what do I read? Should I read Korean news? A Korean fiction book? A Korean non-fiction book? What about some modern fiction in English, so I can learn from it to improve my own writing as well as better know the lay of the land in a world I want to inhabit? Or what about reading some non-fiction about a science or history or philosophy or religion topic, something to feed my soul as it grapples for answers about the world?
None of this makes me unique, of course. Everyone has limited time and more things they'd like to do than they have time available. Lately, I've come to a realization, though, about how badly I've managed my time in my life. Not that I haven't managed to buckle down and get productive. I've done that plenty. But I keep changing my mind about what I'd like to be productive about. One week I think I should put dreams away and focus on knowing everything about Korea I can. The next I tell myself what's life for if not to follow my dreams, so I chuck work and write. Or read something completely not work-related. At the moment, I'm trying to have it both ways and read a book on religion (God's Problem by Bart Ehrman), but the Korean translation of it.
All I've really managed to accomplish by ping-ponging back and forth between subjects in my life is that I'm okay at a few things but probably not great at any. I've suspected this for a long time, but every time I try to force myself to pick one thing to go all-in trying to master, I am wracked by self-doubt. What if I've picked the wrong thing? What if I'm putting all my effort into something I'll never be that good at? The result is that I start and stop efforts to keep moving in one direction over and over.
Lately, I've been doing something with my free time I've never done before: nothing. I'm so exasperated with myself and my inability to pick something, I just do nothing. I fritter my precious free time away, hate myself for having wasted it, then do it again the next day.
Essentially, I feel I've frittered so much time away that I'm now too old to become great at anything. At that point, I become momentarily frantic and start to work doubly hard to make up for lost time. Soon after that, I am overwhelmed by how hard it is to get better even when I'm trying my best, start thinking that all the effort is pointless, and I stare off at nothing for an hour until it's time to go to bed.
I usually return to the idea that what I ought to do is focus on work and other practical matters I all too often neglect. I should make money, save money, and use that money to help people who need it. It's what I settled on in my early thirties when I gave up on writing. And I succeeded for years at keeping my mind on secular matters. But I just couldn't keep that other person locked away for good.
Some intellectual-minded people tend to look down on those who live an unexamined life. I don't do that at all. The wise preacher in Ecclesiastes--possibly the book that has dealt with how little the universe makes sense better than any other--didn't come up with much better. "Go, eat your food with gladness, and drink your wine with a joyful heart...Enjoy life with your wife, whom you love, all the days of this meaningless life God has given you under the sun--all your meaningless days" (Ecc 9:7,9).
I probably still have a few more rounds of futilely cycling through trying to get better at things I think of as "important" in my life, but I'm starting to imagine the later acts of my life not involving much serious thought at all.
Growing old is the gradual realization that life has no meaning.
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