The day jobs of novelists
This is an older essay, from 2004, but well worth the read. It's topic is writer's block, but it's really about differing views on the mode of production in writing, or at least the mindset a writer brings to the act of producing.
I've always wanted to be like Trollope, mostly because I find that I'm at my best, in most parts of life, when there is a routine and the quality becomes a result of showing up every day and putting in the work, not having a direct line to the muses or strokes of genius. But that's me. I look to him, because Trollope*, like Faulkner, TS Eliot, Bukowski and others, had a day job of no grand remark. I think it's a relatively late invention, the idea of writers as writers alone. The literature would change, or at least increase in variety, if everyone got over the cabin-in-the-woods image of the writer, which is either a nostalgic throwback to Thoreau, a late 20th century anamoly brought on by the publishing industry's advance business model, or the even newer market economy of the MFA system. I'd rather have mechanics who are poets and poets who can throw a punch.
*What I mean by Trollope:
"Trollope reported in his “Autobiography,” he woke in darkness and wrote from 5:30 a.m. to 8:30 a.m., with his watch in front of him. He required of himself two hundred and fifty words every quarter of an hour. If he finished one novel before eight-thirty, he took out a fresh piece of paper and started the next. The writing session was followed, for a long stretch of time, by a day job with the postal service. Plus, he said, he always hunted at least twice a week. Under this regimen, he produced forty-nine novels in thirty-five years. Having prospered so well, he urged his method on all writers: “Let their work be to them as is his common work to the common laborer. No gigantic efforts will then be necessary. He need tie no wet towels round his brow, nor sit for thirty hours at his desk without moving,—as men have sat, or said that they have sat.”











