Is Writing Your Dream Job?

November 29, 2007

There's something of a running joke in my family. It concerns my wife, Leanne, and her "dream job." Now, Leanne is a medical technologist and she appears to really like her job and I think she's probably pretty good at it, but like most of us, she wishes she was doing something else from time to time. On her list of dream jobs:

U.S. Attorney General

Director of White House Communications

Constitutional Lawyer

Grounds Keeper for Detroit Tigers (Comerica Park)

Construction flag waver (you know, the person who stands out there on the highway and holds up a flag and tells you to slow down or stop).

Chef (haven't heard this one in a while)

Historian

Policy Wonk

Kayak tour guide

And for all I know, sometime she'll be one of them. Who can tell?

I confess that about 90% of what I do these days is my dream job. I love being a freelance writer. I'm thrilled that this is how I make my living. What about the other 10%?

Well, the real dream job would be to make a full-time living as a novelist, writing one or two novels a year. The "but" to that statement, having learned a great deal about how the publishing business works over the last few years is:

1. I would need to make enough money to live more than comfortably on and have a publisher who paid their advances and royalty checks in a timely, PREDICTABLE fashion. (Good luck).

2. I would have to be big enough (i.e., popular, selling enough) to have some version of security. That might mean being a bestseller.

I'm still working on this and I still have faith it will happen.

So, despite having my 90% dream job, which is, I suspect, significantly more than most people have, are there things about it that make me wish I were, oh, I don't know, doing something like, hmmm...

Running a surf shop on the beach in Maui?

Well, yeah. I confess, there are a lot of jobs that interest me, but not necessarily to the degree that I would pursue them. (Probably much like my wife's list of dream jobs). I think being an ambassador to someplace like Italy or, say, Costa Rica, would be interesting. I wonder what it would be like to run a bar on an island in the Caribbean. Since I've started taking up guitar, I'm reminded that at one point in my life the possibility of my earning a music degree and spending my days (afternoons & evenings, more likely) teaching kids piano and probably doing some gigs was quite high, but I consciously decided I didn't want to. Sometimes that strikes me now as being a perfectly acceptable way to make a living that I would probably have enjoyed.

Here's the thing, and I suspect it's true for bestselling novelists. It's certainly true for this full-time freelance writer:

It's a job. 

They call it work for a reason.

Sure, I love it. Sure, I look forward to hitting my desk every morning. This is light years away from the dread I felt about getting in the car and driving to the hospital in Detroit for 18 years, experiencing toward the end what I called my "elevator moods," which is to say, when I shut off the engine of my car there in Lot 12 by the Clara Ford Pavilion (or was it 10? How soon we forget!), my mood would sink and go black like a fast-moving elevator. Shit, Kemosabe, that's no way to live your life!

But sometimes the money doesn't come when you want it (or need it). Sometimes your clients are a pain in the ass. Sometimes you don't have work when you want it (or need it). Sometimes the business just doesn't run smoothly for one reason or another. Sometimes publishers owe you money and find a whole variety of reasons why they haven't paid you yet ("The check's in the mail" is a cliche because it's been said a million times, folks; it's not a joke! or a more recent reason given for no check: "We're really busy" and "well, we're checking into it.")

Still, I have very little to bitch about. I'm mostly doing what I dreamed of doing.

How about you? What's your dream job?

And maybe more importantly here, if writing is your dream job, what are your OTHER dream jobs?

Cheers,

Mark Terry