With that being said, I'll start my rant by saying I had an interview this Monday, that in my opinion, went pretty awful. "Why?" you ask. Well, because I spoke about my writing, about my novel, about graduate school too much. My passion and excitement overwhelmed the interviewer, in my opinion at least. He mentioned one of the reasons to not hiring me was because he thinks it best I concentrate on my novel (which is also my senior thesis) for the last semester of my master's degree and not have a demanding job get in the way.....
Things running through my mind at the very moment I heard his words spit across the phone line: Do you think I'm incapable of writing a novel as well as working a full time job? Who are you to judge what I can handle? But, instead, I smiled and laughed through the phone saying, "no problem" and "thanks so much" and that was that.
I am a writer.
But does that mean I should not have a well paying job, with benefits and support as well as being a writer. I have two jobs and I feel as if only writers and other artists could possibly understand this. We write and then we have a job that pays the bills. Having my writing career as my main focus does not mean that whatever other employment I obtain will be met with any less passion. I love to work, and I am passionate about all projects, whether they pay or not.
Non-writers may assume two things: that as a writer I devote all of my time staring at blank pages on a desk in order to come up with the next "Great American Novel" or that writing is so simple that I should be spouting books from my mouth and handing them to a publisher like some manufacturing company.
And once you tell someone you're a writer, that's it. You've been labeled. The starving artist, the creative mind, the avid, know all of literature, the expert of publishing, the "person writing that book." Everyone wants to read it. But when you give them a copy, they won't. They ask every week, "how's the writing going?" And what does one say to that? They don't want to hear the dilemmas of structure, your debate of present and past tense, the difficulty of explaining a character, and so on.
I made the mistake of labeling my myself in an interview and when speaking about my novel off hand, I became "The Writer." And although my writing, he said, was great, I didn't have enough marketing experience as he would have wanted. But that may be because once being labeled the writer, the experience I did have in marketing wasn't compelling enough, and when talking about my novel, I became more passionate about that than the essentials of the interview.
Writers are multi-versed. We know politics, media, government, literature, news, Internet, advertising, production, editing, and much more. Because in order to survive as a writer, one must apply their talents to more than just simply writing. So we must over compensate for our passion, we must combine it with other knowledge and we must always have two jobs (or so I see it, unless you become Stephen King, J.K. Rowling or John Grisham).
So, yes, rant over. My sympathies with other writers expanding their expertise to other employment sectors. Maybe with some experience, or perhaps a "Julie and Julia" incident in my life, I can land a truly awesome writing job that not only captures the heart of my passion but also gives me the benefits and pay necessary in order to live in this realistically harsh world.
Until next time Ladies and Gentleman!
-Rachel
