Writerly resolutions for 2018: say hello to the rest of our lives

(This post is a reprint. The writer will return to regular schedule January 2, 2018.)

For this final entry about writers’ resolutions for 2018, I want to write about something besides writing. Notice, this isn’t about quitting. It’s about expanding, about having a life outside of writing that nourishes the craft emotionally as well as physically.

It’s often said that most writers can’t support themselves solely as writers. And that’s not a bad thing. History (and literature) are full of examples of authors whose “outside” job actually led to their writing. Or informed it. Or just made them better writers by broadening their experience and sympathy.

image: pixabay

Take doctors, for instance. Medicine may hardly seem like a profession for those with a literary bent (although for several years I’ve attended a local Literature + Medicine conference aimed at using literature to aid medical workers.) But medicine is among the professions which have historically produced major literary figures. And not just by writing about medicine.

Consider the careers of Anton Chekov. Or Abraham Verghese. Even Arthur Conan Doyle. (Where would his Sherlock Holmes have been without Dr. Watson?)

Or consider the late Oliver Sacks, who was still in active medical practice nearly forty years after his first bestseller, Awakenings, was turned into a popular film. After a further string of popular and critically-acclaimed books, Sacks could probably have afforded financially to drop his medical career. But he knew the value of having a day job.

I’ve thought of making a list of all the doctors who maintained practices while writing. Or all the dentists, lawyers, teachers, civil servants, business people and others who continued to write, and write well, while practicing their “day jobs.” But it would fill all the room in all my posts for the rest of this year. 

For now, I’ll just urge all of us to seize the advantages a day job offers for enhancing writing in the coming year.

I trained and worked for several years as a journalist, then spent nearly twenty-five years of my working life in customer service work because my family needed the regular hours a nonwriting job provided. But even as a journalist I’d never have learned the breadth of information I did as a customer service rep. In the course of talking about their financial issues, callers gave me a wealth of information about their personal lives, ways of speaking and making a living I couldn’t have learned in a lifetime of reading research articles.

How else would I have known what it’s like to be a welfare mom, a truck driver, an accountant, a prisoner, an immigrant student? Heard how many dialects there are among Southerners, Midwesterners, New Englanders? Or what it’s like to be very old or disabled or just plain furious at life?

Since retiring from the bureaucracy of a large government agency with the (fulfilled) intention of writing more, I’ve volunteered at a nonprofit organization that provides therapy through horsemanship. It reconnects me with a love of horses developed from early life on a working cattle ranch. And it’s opened even more possibilities for characters and settings.

For 2018, let’s embrace our “day jobs,” whatever working hours those entail, both for themselves and their application to our writing. And consider volunteering or pursuing a hobby outside of writing. Who knows where it may lead?