what if i can't afford to JUST be a writer?

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life changes. always. you can count on it just as much as you can count on the clock to keep ticking. what does that mean? you have to keep ticking, too.

forgive me for assuming, but i dare say that you, just like me, are definitely a writer. you're sure of it. other people are too. but the world might not see it that way...yet.

so until then, you are a double agent. you work just like the rest of the american dreamers, but you also write as much as humanly possible. i don't think that's a bad thing, and i'll tell you why:

a little background first

these days, i'm a real estate agent, have i mentioned that before? it's my "day job", if you can call it that. a lot my work is actually done at random hours: late night texts with a counter offer, late night emails with issues, early morning conversations, weekend (lots of it) working. sometimes i work more on the weekend in a 48 hour period.

i feel like the past five years,  well really since i graduated from college, i have been reinventing myself. i was a signed artist for a few, signed songwriter only for a little while, and then i did the books for my husband's restaurant in an interim period. but right before we got married two years ago, i got my real estate license. it was more on a whim than a plan, but it works for me. i don't exercise the same half of my brain when i sell real estate, which makes me hungry for my writing after a long day of contracts and negotiations.

and that brings me to my point, two points actually.

point #1

i could be embarrassed that i haven't had the same job for the past however many years. i could feel like a failure for changing hats so many times (it seems) to try to find myself. i could feel like i'm just a quitter. but i'm not. i know i'm not.  i bust my booty trying to make everything i do, no matter what it is work, and while for a while there (years ago) i like there was something wrong with me...i now have a completely shifted outlook.

point #2

if i had been in the same job for that long, i would have zero life experience other than i was born, went to K-12, went to college, got a job, found a husband, blah blah blah. and that's all good and well if you're not a writer. but it doesn't work so well if you are, ya know? being a writer means i need lots of lots of experiences, not just plain jane ones. of course a lot of them will come with some measure of pain, but again, that's what we writers need.

i don't know if i've said this before but when i was 12 or 13, i wanted to be a writer, more specifically a songwriter. my family is in music, it's what the "huff" tends to mean living in nashville. so i figured that writing meant it should be music. it was a natural fit i thought, and because i was also a lyrical dancer, i was way into the whole lyric thing. anyway, i remember this vividly. my dad and i were outside our little run-down lake house on old hickory lake in the driveway possibly loading or unloading the car. i said something like "dad, i want to write". it was a bold statement for my age maybe. and my dad, being a realist and the complete opposite of a stage parent, said "but ash, you have nothing to say yet". he didn't mean it as a put down. he meant it to be encouraging. but i was 12ish, so i went off the deep end for the next few minutes. i'm sure i cried, if not then, later. i do remember saying something like this: "nothing has happened to me! you and mom love each other, we live in a mid-size city (rather than a small town), i love my family, no tragedies have happened to us, nothing. the only thing i know i will eventually feel is when my heart is broken." i pouted and pouted and asked God to give me something to write about.  looking back, i howl laughing at that because it was as if i had sealed my own fate.

boy oh boy did i get my heart broken. severed in half, chopped into a million pieces, and sprinkled into the Tennessee River. it happened about seven years later, after a string of less sever breakups. so after i had wallowed enough, i looked up and said "thanks, God. now i have something to write about". kind of pathetic, but very true.

i wrote my first song-incidentally with my dad. i put it up on my website so you can hear it. click on the music section of this site on ashlyne.co. it's called "good for goodbye".  and then, after that, i was a writing fool.

skip to now, a decade later, almost to the month. i have had plenty of life experiences of my own, including the "regular" ones i thought i'd always have (college, marriage, buying a first house, thinking about having children). but what i write about are the crap experiences i didn't like at the time but now seem super valuable. like in falling stars, i write subtly about a life i led for four dense years. i took what i experienced, added what i know about my own town, a life living in a house with a producer, and a friend of mine from a Bible study and rolled it into one, but a lot of the details have truth to them.

if i hadn't gone through the pain i did in those years, that book couldn't have been written. it could have been written differently possibly with all my years living in nashville amongst artists and songwriters and producers, but living on the outskirts can only get you so far in a book when you're forming characters who need to be believable to the experts in that field. those four years of personal ups and downs in the music industry gave me that inside view. and i know for a fact they can happen. some of those are my story (with obvious changes).

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in conclusion

your story might be 100% the opposite from mine, but...isn't that the point? the job you're in right now gives you a different life perspective, even it it means you write about someone who hates his/her job so much that they might kill someone. please don't kill someone. but you get what i mean. in real estate i come across personalities i'd never think of on my own. i come across people who think so differently from me that i wouldn't have thought their words/decisions/reactions would be even believable. but every time i encounter one of these folks, i put that situation, personality, etc. in my writer's well to be called upon later when i need someone to come out of the woodwork and throw a curveball. 

your job, whatever it is, does that. and on top of you reading a lot, will give you a lot of practice with character development. 

tiny exercise

take it or leave it, but i suggest you get a little notebook, a skinny moleskin or one of those 99 cent pocket sized ones from the drugstore. keep it in a safe place or in your purse and add personality traits, a person you encounter, a situation you're in that you might want to forget to move on in your actual life but might be perfect for a future character to have to wade through. write it all down. make your job work for you for once. 

it might actually feel like your day job is just research. maybe not every day, but sometimes! 

it does not make you less of a writer to have another job. it just doesn't. so don't get sad or down or question it. just keep writing. (i am.)