The Day Job

 The Day Job

By C. A. Asbrey

We authors all have to work for a living, but the lucky ones get to give up the day job and spend time as a full time writer. But what do we do until we get there? More than that, what did your favourite author do before they managed to concentrate on writing full time? Some, like Jane Austin, were never in a position to work even if they wanted to, and others like Charlotte Brontë were restricted by society into roles like governesses, or in the cases of Susan Ferrier and Mary Shelley, wrote anonymously so they could maintain their place in society, but I'm more interested in those who seem to have woven a world that captured us while working for a daily crust.

George Bernard Shaw

George Bernard Shaw gave up work relatively early, in his twenties, being cushioned by being born into a comfortable family in Ireland. Part of the Protestant Ascendency, he was of English descent with a mother from a wealthy family. He began working for a firm of Dublin Land Agents at the age of twenty-three, but moved to London where he eventually took up a position at the Edison Telephone Company with great reluctance. He worked in the basement, demonstrating telephone systems to the public. He said on The Irrational Knot, that his audience was uncertain "as to whether they ought to tip me or not: a question they either decided in the negative or never decided at all; for I never got anything."  

He left when the Edison Telephone Company merged with the Bell Telephone company, and took up writing full time.

The Hardy Tree

Thomas Hardy's family weren't so wealthy. His stone mason father educated him until the age of sixteen, before being apprenticed to a local architect. He moved to London in 1862 and won several prizes from the Royal Institute of British Architects. He worked in London at a time when the railway system was expanding rapidly, but that also meant that land had to be cleared. In a city as old as London that meant either knocking down existing buildings or going through land used for other purposes. When St. Pancras station was under construction the local churchyard had to be cleared, and in the well-established tradition of dumping the most unpleasant jobs on the most junior employees, Hardy was assigned the job of exhuming the human remains and reburying them at another site.

Once this was done, Hardy found himself with hundreds of old headstones. Feeling that it was just wrong to dispose of them, he arranged them in a circular pattern in another part of the graveyard. Over the years an ash tree self-seeded in the centre. It absorbed many stones as it grew, melding into a tourist attraction in its own right. Sadly, the tree died after catching a fungal infection, perenniporia fraxinea, but the grave stones are still there.

The famous writer of Westerns, Louis L'Amour, had a colourful life before taking up his pen. His veterinarian father had financial difficulties in the 1920s, leading Louis and his brother to take to the road. They mined, baled hay, skinned cattle, worked sawmills and lumber camps, became a professional boxer, merchant seaman, and mine assessor. His work not only took him all over the USA, providing a mine of characters and research for his novels, but he visited England, Japan, China, Borneo, the Dutch East Indies, Arabia, Egypt, and Panama. All this was a wonderful preparation for a writer. It echoes the peripatetic life of Jack Kerouac who washed dishes, picked cotton,  worked as a night guard (as mentioned in On The Road), pumped gas, a fire watcher, a sailor, a construction worker, and a railroad brakeman.

It's well known that Arthur Conan Doyle was a surgeon, that Herman Melville was a sailor, and that Agatha Christie worked in a hospital pharmacy during WW1. Charles Dickens started work in a factory as a child, was an actor, Journalist and law clerk, and we can see influences of all these careers in his books. Margaret Atwood was a barista who famously struggled with the till. James Joyce abandoned his medical degree and became a cinema operator. Harper Lee was an airline check-in agent who wrote in her spare time. She was famously given a year off to write, paid for by the composer Michael Brown. 

P. D. James 

Crime writer P. D. James' family did not believe in further education for girls, so she was at a disadvantage when her army doctor husband was hospitalised after WW2, and was institutionalised. She studied hospital administration and worked during the day, writing in the evenings. She moved on to the civil service and worked there, including the criminal section of the Home Office, until her retirement in 1979, when she wrote full-time. A life that's a model for many modern writers, I'm sure.

Looking at the lives of many famous writers, an obvious pattern appears. In the past, a certain degree of privilege and wealth was the main way people were free to explore their creativity, but people have been combining writing with the day job for a long time. 

One thing's for sure. There's no one way to get the life experience to be a writer, but the best use it all in creating their worlds.