Emma Miller @emmadmiller-blog - Tumblr Blog

I always appreciate your pragmatic and straightforward opinion on working and creating. I'm a creative nonfiction writer by night and an uninspired nonprofit marketer by day. What's your advice for someone like me who needs to pay the bills but just wants to be immersed in creating and building community around that? I'm in near-constant purgatory at work, and I hate it. Should I just shut my mouth and keep at it? Is this forever?

I get asked this question more than almost any other. And it’s something I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about. Here’s what I wrote about it in Steal Like An Artist:

I kept a day job until I made more money off art than I did at my day job. And even then, it was scary for me to leave it. Everybody always tosses out that tired “do what you love, and the rest will follow” shit, and I don’t buy it. (I usually say, “Do what you love and the debt will follow.”)

You have to pay the bills and feed the mouths, and you do it however you can. I got married when I was 23—I’ve had a family to support for a while now. I guess in my attitude, I’m a lot like Philip Larkin:

I was brought up to think you had to have a job, and write in your spare time, like Trollope. Then, when you started earning enough money by writing, you phase the job out. But in fact I was over fifty before I could have “lived by my writing”—and then only because I had edited a big anthology—and by that time you think, Well, I might as well get my pension, since I’ve gone so far….All I can say is, having a job hasn’t been a hard price to pay for economic security.

And my experience has been that economic security has always helped my art along more than any kind of “spiritual” freedom or whatever.

“The trick is,” film executive Tom Rothman says, “from the business side, to try to be fiscally responsible so you can be creatively reckless.”

One thing I would recommend to you is to see the day job as a positive, not a negative:

A day job gives you money, a connection to the world, and a routine. Freedom from financial stress also means freedom in your art. As photographer Bill Cunningham says, “If you don’t take money, they cant tell you what to do.”

Because the real truth is, once you start making money doing what you love, it BECOMES A JOB. And with it comes all the hassle of a job. Here’s Larkin again:

You can live by “being a writer,” or “being a poet,” if you’re prepared to join the cultural entertainment industry, and take handouts from the Arts Council (not that there are as many of them as there used to be) and be a “poet in residence” and all that. I suppose I could have said—it’s a bit late now—I could have had an agent, and said, Look, I will do anything for six months of the year as long as I can be free to write for the other six months. Some people do this, and I suppose it works for them.

In other words: you always have a day job. (My friend Hugh calls this “The Sex & Cash Theory.”) Right now my day job is going around giving talks and writing and selling books. It’s a good day job, but “doing what I love” would actually mean sitting around all day reading and drawing and making these goofy poems. Guess how much that pays? Not much. And guess how much time I actually get to do that stuff? Not much.

Anyways, this is supposed to encourage you. Every artist without a sugar mama or a trust fund or extreme luck has had to deal with this.

Just hang in there.

This is what I recommend: get up early. Get up early and work for two hours on the thing you really care about. Then, when you’re done, go to your job. When you get there, your boss can’t take the thing you really care about away from you, because you already did it. And you know you’ll get to do it tomorrow morning, as long as you make it through today.

The “meaning” in your job is: it pays the bills. Get as good at it as you can, because it’ll make the job more interesting to you, and it will provide you exits to another one. Then find the rest of your meaning elsewhere.

For more inspiration from people better and smarter than me, click this tag: “Keep your day job.”

emmadmiller-blog

This is just what I needed to read this week.

ryansheasmith

In the Blue Ridge Mountains outside of Asheville, NC with Emma. April 2013.

emmadmiller-blog

Return trip necessary.

Sixteen months after graduating from college, I've had an unpaid internship at a prestigious media organization and a paid internship at a more prestigious media organization. I've confronted rejection, moved back to my college town, worked my first pay-the-bills part-time job in the service industry, and dealt with the feelings of judgment and inferiority that come with asking people you know from school whether they'd prefer an 8-oz or a 12-oz cup. I've written for a local paper, at first for free and then for pay, and I've collaborated on a project with artists and writers far more experienced than I. I've given notice, I've questioned choices, and I've fallen in love. I've lived with a boy man for the first time and thought about the future. I've struggled to articulate exactly what I want to do professionally. I've ruled out certain career paths. I've reconsidered others. I've sent applications into the abyss and said no to jobs that didn't feel right. I've worked from home and then craved more structure. I've longed for more opportunities and been grateful for the ones I have. I've felt bound to a place because of falling in love. I've worried about settling in one place so soon. I've been happier than ever before. I've treaded water to stay afloat. I've felt inadequate and untalented. I've felt skilled and confident. I hate the not-knowing, but there's something exciting about the search. When do next steps become clear?

#life #professional life #post-college #millennials #job search #love #twenty-something

ryansheasmith

Emma. Baltimore 2012.

emmadmiller-blog

Whoa, didn't even recognize myself at first. Cool picture, Ryan.

whatshouldbetchescallme

When someone asks me what I'm doing after graduation

emmadmiller-blog

From one year out, I say: That's okay, friends! The freak-outs will continue every time you embark on a new project, but the pieces will slowly come together! Hang in there! Those that didn't/still don't know -- and I'm in that category -- are living much more interesting lives.

Here are things I would like to be: a critic, a radio host, an actress, an arts and culture journalist, a writer of creative nonfiction, a producer of documentary film, a media scholar, a festival programmer, an audio documentarian, a playwright, a mom, a lover, a friend, someone with health insurance and a social life ... Totally doable, right? (Any hot grad school tips would be appreciated ...)

#job #grad school #life ambitions #employment #passions

depressio-blog

By some estimates, Durham and Chapel Hill are separated by only 10-or-so miles. By other accounts, they share a common, unsecured border and are therefore separated by only 0-or-so miles. Either way, life for residents of Chapel Hill has become increasingly intolerable in recent years as a...

Bar Napkin Sonnet #11

Things happen when you drink too much mescal. One night, with not enough food in my belly, he kept on buying. I’m a girl who’ll fall damn near in love with gratitude and, well, he was hot and generous and so the least that I could do was let him kiss me, hard and soft and any way you want it, beast and beauty, lime and salt—sweet Bacchus’ pards— and when his friend showed up I felt so warm and generous I let him kiss me too. His buddy asked me if it was the worm inside that makes me do the things I do. I wasn’t sure which worm he meant, the one I ate? The one that eats at me alone? —Moira Egan

#love #valentine's day #mescal #single #poetry #moira egan #drinking alone

After my book came out, my former college boyfriend said, “At least you can go nuts, now that you’ve become a real writer.” Like every recent college graduate I knew, bringing up the rear of Generation X, he yearned to check out and waste some serious time. Despite his classics degree he’d become a management consultant, though, and, as such, he simply couldn’t find his way into the seemingly exclusive and glamorous milieu of mental illness. Was he depressed? Perhaps, but he couldn’t conceive of it as a possibility—not because of the taboo but because he didn’t believe he’d fulfilled the prerequisites. Management consultants drank. They didn’t take antidepressants. They weren’t interesting enough to go nuts. Going nuts was a point of pride. You had to train for it.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/02/youll-love-her-shes-crazy.html

#mental illness #depression #new yorker