I wish it weren’t necessary
December 15th, 2007… but we all find it’s necessary to point these things out sometimes, and what better time than now? I’ve been told that you can substitute “freelancer” or “telecommuter” or other permutations of “people who work at home” for the appearance of “writer” in most of the following.
1: Writers write. If I put work aside every time there was something else to do, nothing would ever get done — not spec, not assignments. This is why I don’t own any video game consoles, The Sims, or that digital cable package that would give me all the Phoenix Suns games (I do watch most of the Red Sox games on NESN, though).
2: If I have time to email you but not to talk on the phone, that’s not some crazy weird mysterious thing — it follows pretty handily: I can jot an email quickly, or respond to a longer one in the inevitable breaks of writing, but a phone call is a monolithic block of time in which I’m doing nothing else, and I can’t tab back and forth from it.
3: Just because I had time to go to a movie in the afternoon one week does not mean I am free all the time forever at the drop of a hat; it means my schedule is not as static as yours. Some days I’m busier than others! It’s such a simple thing that I have no idea how to explain it. It’s like saying “hi, I have feet.” Where do you go from there? I DO have feet. If you don’t understand that, I don’t think it’s my fault.
4: Calling me a workaholic is not going to make me see the light, throw my hands up, and say “well then, I guess I won’t do any more work today.” I’m not a workaholic. I’m someone who sometimes has days when I work until ten or eleven at night, as a way to pay for the days when I go see a movie in the afternoon, read a couple hundred pages of a book, and then work for a few hours on fiction I might or might not someday be paid for.
5: That time when I’m writing fiction, that’s work too. It’s the most flexible time on my schedule, and that makes it the most important, because it can be put off indefinitely, but if it is, everything goes to shit. My work-for-hire jobs exist only and wholly in order to build a lifestyle in which I can write for spec — or even, in the case of my novel The Sun Eater, write for a market I don’t know will ever exist.
6: The fact that I have time to check my email or the internet in general does not mean that I am lying about being busy. If I reply to your email, you have not tricked me into revealing that I’m not as busy as I say I am.
7: The fact that the television is on or I am listening to music does not mean that I am lying about being busy.
8: I don’t get sick days. I don’t get vacation days. I don’t get days where I can kind of phone it in and slack off or stretch three hours of work into eight, and still get the same paycheck. I get paid for effort, not time or the courtesy of showing up. I’m not saying it’s awesome, I’m not saying it’s impressive, I’m not saying I am some demigod of labor and grit, I’m just saying it is what it is.
9: Some careers are lifestyle choices — writing, or freelancing in general, is hardly the only one. Academics have little say in where they live, for instance, and can rarely (and even then, at great inconvenience) take time off other than the regularly scheduled academic breaks. Many people in medical and legal fields are on call, officially or in practice, at off-hours. Transportation workers have strange hours. My brother, among his many other duties, does commercial and home snow-removal in the winter — which can mean working all night with very little notice.
This is just how it is.