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Your writing and your job

What do you do when you aren’t writing? How do you pay the bills? Is your job something you do just to support your writing habit or is writing what you do to escape from the daily spin?

I’m extremely grateful for the job I have. I work in publishing, doing anything from copywriting, proofreading, working with freelancers and a whole range of things. I love the perspective the job gives me and will enjoy seeing where it takes me. Plus when you work in publishing you tend to get a lot of free books, which, for a bibliophile like myself, is like…

….give me a minute…I’m trying to think of some example that doesn’t involve the term “Candyland.”

Anyways, here’s a fun post I found on author Alison Kent’s blog about how she actually found that she couldn’t write at home…that she needed a job to get her away from the distractions sitting around the house.

On a tangent to this line of thought, some people claim that working a job that requires a lot of close contact with the written word is dangerous to one’s desire to actually get published. It can burn out your desire to write, or induce writer’s block because, supposedly, we only have so many words (spoken and written) that we tend to produce in a day. So if someone, like me, spends the day at work writing copy and such, then when I get home and set myself to a story, I won’t have as much mental energy.

(Other people wonder why I haven’t wrangled my “inside” contacts to get published. More on that in a later post, methinks.)

Personally, I find being a literary environment only inspires me further, plus it gives me all sorts of hands-on examples of good/mediocre/bad/superstar authors and writing styles, so even when I’m proofreading and the like, I can ask myself, “Why does this read so well?” or “How can I make sure I don’t write this badly?”

What about you all? What do you away from the keyboard (notepad, etch-a-sketch, whatever)? Of course, the dream is to make these mega-million bestsellers and to be able to do nothing but write fulltime. But I almost wonder if I wouldn’t still need something to anchor me to the outside world.

I see that smile.

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