Part-Time Writer
Making money is necessary. Making meaning even more so.
The relationship between a writer and the other demands on their time can often be a fraught one. Work steals hours from time at the writing desk. Yet hours spent purely in the realm of literature aren’t always inspiring enough to sustain a productive output—otherwise, literature professors would be among our greatest poets and novelists, and this has only very seldom been the case. Hours spent working are also hours spent living—researching life. Franz Kafka laboured long days for an insurance company. T.S. Eliot was first a schoolteacher and then a banker. Louis-Ferdinand Céline was a doctor. Alice Munro was a waitress, a tobacco picker and then a library clerk.
If one is looking for other ways to constrain one’s writing hours while also finding excellent source material, having a family is also quite fruitful. Yet caution is advised here too. The English literary critic and writer, Cyril Connolly, once said: “There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hallway.” Others would disagree. Parenthood increases the value a writer places on time. Shane Jones writes about early parenthood in the Paris Review: “the pockets in which I could work were like mines where I hacked away with a speed I’ve never experienced before, discovering and polishing work.”
Then there’s Gerald Murnane, whose work I am currently reading closely. He once aspired to become a priest, and then abandoned the seminary and became a schoolteacher. Murnane’s autobiographical novel, A Season on Earth, (re-released in an expanded form in 2019) details every painstaking step of this journey. Priests of the Charleroi Fathers, the order that the novel’s main character, Adrian Sherd, initially commits himself to, are typical of all Catholic priests in that their vocation permits no rival devotions. “A celibate priest is able to serve his flock twenty-four hours a day, whereas a married priest would have to give some time to his wife and family,” the narrator explains.
Adrian comes to believe that it’s not a desire for women that hinders his prospects of a fully religious life. What distracts him is an obsession with landscapes. He has decided that “looking at landscapes and observing their effect on his emotions was what he really wanted for his life's work.” And so he must leave the seminary. In the latter stages of the novel, Adrian finds employment at the Teachers' Branch of the Education Department in Melbourne. This posting leaves him with enough energy left over to devote his evenings and weekends to poetry.
And yet Adrian is never not a writer. He cannot simply be a bureaucrat. He is a writer who happens to be working at this particular moment in time as a bureaucrat. This makes all the difference. In his poetry, he has become obsessed with the landscapes of England, and he brings this obsession to the Teachers’ Branch. Between nine to five, his chief task is to reassign teachers from one temporary assignment to another. When he finds a teacher that has been toiling away in a town or village with a quintessentially Australian name, he takes great pleasure in reassigning that person to a school in a town with an English place name—from Black Rock to Penshurst, from Warragul to Horsham, for example.
Every stitch of Adrian’s being yearns to find a world that is different from the one he is living in. This effort animates the dramas playing out in his life, which are almost entirely confined to his mind—to his imagination. The life of a low-level bureaucrat would probably be very boring were it not for the great meaning he attaches to his actions—e.g., saving teachers from drab and uninspiring landscapes.
At many turning points, Adrian doubts his methods. The man he models himself after, the nineteenth century poet and critic, Matthew Arnold, eventually falls short. Nowhere in Arnold’s poetry can Adrian find insight into how to balance his love of landscapes and poetry with his “animal nature”—his lust for women. He goes in search of a new poet to guide him and chooses A.E. Housman, whose poetry conveys a sense of permanent sadness at having experienced deep love followed by a terrible loss. Housman was a lifelong bachelor. Adrian decides that this is the life for him.
Then his commitment to bachelorhood starts to falter. Upon observing a young family in church, he realizes he has never experienced marital bliss, one of the greatest joys that the Catholic church bestows on the faithful. He decides that “to execute the finer details of a poem on the divine qualities of love he would need to have a Catholic girlfriend.” He joins the Young Catholic Workers' Movement, whose members frequently get together socially with their counterparts at the National Catholic Girls' Movement. This reorientation of Adrian’s obsession carries over to his job. He arranges for women teachers with attractive names to be sent to schools where “young men with heroic names were waiting for them.”
After striving for weeks to catch the attention of a young Catholic woman called Clare Keating and losing out to another boy, Adrian again becomes disillusioned. Yet, for a writer, to be disillusioned is simply more material. His memories of stolen happiness will ignite countless poems laden with explosive emotions, he decides. At his day job, instead of assigning teachers to idyllic landscapes or playing matchmaker, he very intentionally looks for men at suburban schools and reassigns them to remote outposts, where they’ll be denied romance and spend hours of solitude, brooding over forlorn landscapes.
Adrian’s approach borders on monomaniacal. Every experience in life is interpreted through one lens: how will it propel him toward greatness as a poet? Gerald Murnane emphasizes this quality and the result is that Adrian is a great comic character—scarcely believable. Of course, he is sixteen years old. If I retrieve the journal I kept at sixteen, currently lying inert with a number of other similar journals in a box in the furnace room, I will similarly find a comic character, whose behavior and motivations make me cringe.
In a more recent autobiographical book than Murnane’s, On Writing, Stephen King describes his development as “a disjointed growth process,” and this is what writing by necessity is: a series of mistakes, frequent missteps and recoveries. The unifying theme is a striving for the disruption of daily life. King, in common with Murnane, had a yearning from a young age to inhabit a different reality. With Murnane it’s a strong desire to be somewhere else. With King it’s a desire to be someone else. He imagines that he is the Ringling Brothers Circus Strongboy. He finds a cement cinderblock in the corner of the garage and carries it very slowly, and he imagines that, rather than his ordinary clothes, he is wearing a leopard skin singlet, and while he is labouring mightily with his load, the expectant crowd is silent, and a "brilliant blue-white spotlight" is following his progress, and the crowd can scarcely believe what they're seeing. "He's only two!" one of them mutters.
When I was trying to find a title for this post, I wondered whether “Part-Time Writer” was appropriate because the identity of a writer is also full-time. It cannot be discarded like an overcoat. And yet in the comic character of Adrian Sherd, one can see the danger of a writer’s identity that dominates and subsumes all other identities. Such a person—a sixteen-year-old dreamer who remained forever with a sixteen-year-old’s mindset—would be ridiculous, or worse, a monster. This is why I eventually returned to the original title. A part-time writer doesn’t have to exclusively mean a writer who only writes part-time. After all, what exactly is “part-time”? No one works “full-time” on anything. What about all the other demands on time, such as sleeping and eating and shoveling the snow and waiting for the bus or e-scootering to the backyard party at the home of one of your best friends? Part-time writer can denote that part of oneself that is always present in other moments and yet not consuming those moments greedily. It can mean a happy co-existence.
Many years ago, a therapist helped me identify a source of great anguish. While I was able to advance on my writing projects, it seemed that my writing time frequently became a second priority when placed into conflict with competing demands. This therapist said that I would have to identify a time of day that would be sacrosanct, during which no competing demands could encroach. This was not original advice and yet the therapist worked through these problems with specific reference to my own particular case, and so it felt more relevant to me than reading this advice in a book. This is how I settled on the hours of four to six in the morning as my prime writing time. Other hours can be writing time, but four to six is sacred.
This isn’t to say that those hours haven’t ever been encroached upon—by a crying baby, by the chirping of a smoke alarm with a low battery, and sometimes by the sheer human need to catch up on sleep. Yet, for the most part, at least five days a week, I maintain those hours. That’s an average of ten hours a week. Forty hours a month. Four hundred and eighty hours a year. This is merely the baseline. Whenever a project demands it, I am quite prepared to take a whole day off and give it six or eight hours more.
And yet having settled on this approach, part of me remained resentful that this was all the time I had. After all, what’s two hours of writing compared to eight hours at a job? What about all the time in the day that to an aggrieved frame of mind seems like filler? Stirring the rice, looking for a pair of socks, waiting for the Zoom meeting to start… When those precious minutes are added up, it can start to feel like a huge portion of a day is spent waiting for other things to happen: for the rice to be cooked, for the socks to be found, for the meeting to start. Yet here the identity of a part-time writer can be the savior. For in this moment, I am not just stirring rice or looking for socks or waiting for the meeting. I am also, part-time, taking notes. And to take notes, one needs to really pay attention to what’s going on. Which makes a person better at stirring rice, looking for socks, waiting for the meeting to start. Or at least it can compel a person to try to get better at those things.
I now understand better than ever that I can be a part-time writer while being a full-time human and that these are not competing identities. Rather than resenting that only two hours of my day can be devoted to writing, I am grateful that I have at least these hours carved out—among the holiest of my holies—and that I am safe, warm, well fed and well rested enough to utilize them. I am very lucky to be a part-time writer.
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Notes
I am working to expand my understanding of Gerald Murnane’s work. He increasingly has become my inspiration for what a writer can do, especially when living outside the usual cosmopolitan settings preferred by a great many established authors—cities like London, New York, Paris, Toronto, etc. “I have never traveled more than a day’s journey by road or train from my birthplace,” writes Murnane in Border Districts. This is not my experience, of course, but I can appreciate how Murnane has intentionally enhanced his imaginative power by focussing very closely on the landscapes closest to him, and juxtaposing them with great themes that he has encountered elsewhere in his life or in books, films, music, sport. This approach is striking for its originality. There is no writer quite like Murnane, and I plan to write more about him this year.
Books
A Season on Earth, Gerald Murnane. The Text Publishing Company, 2019
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, Stephen King. Scribner; Anniversary edition, 2010
Articles, essays
“Pram in the Hallway,” Shane Jones. The Paris Review
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2014/01/29/the-pram-in-the-hall/
“The relentlessly introspective vision of Gerald Murnane,” Jamie Fisher. The Washington Post
I’ve learned that while I’m cooking the rice and finding the socks, the subconscious--the truly creative aspect of mind--is still at work on the writing project. And usually its best ideas bubble up when I’m not at the keyboard but doing something else.