From Alizah Salario, on how to answer that dreaded question when you’re just working a day job to pay the bills:

I take pause when people ask me what I do. I’ve held full time paying positions as a high school teacher, a journalist and at a financial services firm, but first and foremost I consider myself a writer. Yet I often don’t identify myself as such because I fear doing so would sound pretentious, as if I sit with my herbal tea in a bucolic setting and the koans of wisdom just pour out of me. (Okay, I am drinking herbal tea as I write this). But I also hesitate to call myself a writer because, though I make my living stringing together words in various syntactical and stylistic forms, it’s not quite that simple. I feel like a fraud, because to me “making a living” means having disposable income and putting money into savings. I have to hustle to pay the bills, and if I were to stop writing, nobody would be asking me to continue. A writer writer seems like someone the world can’t live without.

I had the hardest time with this question when I was a stay-at-home dad, even though it was a voluntary decision. I hesitated to answer, or mumbled something about helping out with my wife’s business, instead of just owning my life choices. Of course I wanted to say I was going to grad school and working on becoming a writer, but that seemed pretentious too. After I had to go back to my old IT job it was even worse, because I felt like I’d failed after putting so much time and energy into writing.

After a few months of being back at work, I went to a reading where I was talking to a friend of a friend. I told him about how I used to stay at home, then the whole sob story about going back to work when the economy crashed, etc, etc. A few minutes later his girlfriend walked up; she hadn’t heard the first part of the story, and asked me what I did for a living. When I finished explaining, the guy said I visibly slumped and sighed before I answered. It’s like I was embarrassed to admit I had a responsible (if boring) job. I couldn’t see it for the practical decision it was.

Writing has this weird, unpleasant tendency to make those of us drawn to it feel guilty if we don’t do it (or at least think about it) 24/7. Couple that with the American tendency to let our jobs define us, and that’s a lot of emotional baggage to carry around. The funny thing is that once I finally accepted my fate as someone who worked in IT to pay the bills and liked to write on the side, I ended up getting the job I have now, where I can legitimately call myself a “writer.” Maybe it’s fate; it was probably just persistence and dumb luck. But even now that I genuinely like what I do for a living, I still have trouble with that question. I’ve switched jobs and careers enough times now to know this one won’t be my last. It just happens to be what I do to pay the bills, for now.

Miles Harvey, my thesis adviser at Northwestern, used to have a favorite saying during his workshops. “Sometimes you have to take the pretty little puppies out back and drown them,” he’d say as we debated the merits of one of our carefully wrought essays. What he meant was that sometimes you have to be willing to put one of your precious sentences out of its misery for the sake of the overall narrative. You might think a particular string of words is the most adorable subject and predicate ever set down in type, but it’s really just shitting all over the carpet and ruining your piece. His point, besides the black humor of a writer facing his worst critic, was that we shouldn’t get too attached to any part of our work because it was all subject to being euthanized.

Miles always pushed me to open up more with my writing, stretch it out and give myself more room to say things. He struggled with this himself, he said. He once told me he used to spend hours just to eke out a paragraph at a time while writing his first book, The Island of Lost Maps. I don’t know if I write this way because I started in the attention vacuum of the internet or it’s my natural reserve in real life, but I try to get my point across in as few words as possible (it’s no wonder I like Twitter so much). Concision can be good for quality control, and there’s a long tradition of macho American male writers punching out short, declarative sentences. But it also means I have to choose my words carefully. This gives me another convenient excuse for not writing. When I finally steal some quiet time to work with a half-decent idea rolling around in my head, I can still back out because I think I won’t do it right. It’s not laziness. It isn’t even failure. It’s perfectionism taken to its extreme, which is really just fear of failure.

I’ve had two good conversations with friends in the past week about where I can fit writing into my life now. For the past ten years since I signed up for my first creative writing workshop, I’ve harbored a fantasy that I could turn it into a full-time career. I went to great lengths to make this happen, walking away from a career in IT to be a stay-at-home dad/freelancer and signing up for full-blown graduate school to study the craft of creative writing, only to find myself back where started four years later. A cynic might say this all means I just didn’t have what it takes. I’m a cynic, but not not too cynical to know that it was really just a combination of life choices and bad timing. It’s hard to switch careers. It’s harder to switch to a career that is rapidly being rendered into a free service. It’s even harder to do it while supporting a family. And it’s impossible to pull it off during the worst economy since the Great Depression. That sounds like a lot more excuses, but to me it’s just the facts (I have to believe that to feel like this last decade of my career hasn’t been a complete loss). Both of my friends, simply by asking me how things were going and listening patiently while I spilled my guts, helped me get closer to the answer.

I’ll spare readers the whiny specifics, but what it comes down to is that I’ve accepted that I’m not going to make a living from writing, and I’m finally okay with that. I have a certain skill set in IT that people will pay me to use. I have a good, stable job within walking distance of my house that, when I’m honest with myself, I really don’t hate. It’s a good life and writing can always be a part of it, just as an avocation, not a vocation. I’ll write things because I want to, because it makes me happy when I feel like I have something to say, rather than writing things I think I should be writing because it will push me toward some vague career goal. This starts with finally deciding to heed Miles’ advice and stop being so precious with my words, stop being afraid of throwing something out there because it isn’t perfect, and start remembering that I can always try again if it fails.

I’m also going to stop apologizing for writing here. I’ve always felt like I was selling myself short publishing things here because it’s “just my website,” but it’s where I feel most comfortable, and the one place I know for sure that the people who care will read it. That doesn’t mean I’ll stop looking for opportunities to publish my work elsewhere, but my days of randomly stuffing manila envelopes with SASEs and filling out Submission Manager forms are probably over. If I’ve given up on writing things I think I should be writing, then I need to start writing things that make me happy. And that’s building something better here.

I know better than to promise a set schedule or word count, but my goal is to start writing here more often, with more variety and a little less precision. I’ve been enjoying Chris Jones’ new blog about writing lately, not so much for the writing advice, which is great, but for the sheer energy and joy he seems to be putting into it. In his first post he wrote, “I can’t help imagining the readers who might find their way here, but I’m trying not to over-hope things. Maybe something will come out of it; maybe it will prove just another stutter-step. It doesn’t really matter. For now, I’m just going to write, because that’s what I do, and it’s also what I am.” This blog has been a lot of things for me, and maybe this new dedication will be another stutter-step too. But for now, it’s what feels right.