I attended a talk by the author of Eat, Pray, Love last week - although I did not like the book, few famous authors stop by Bethlehem, so I felt I should go; in the end I enjoyed her speech immensely (she is a very witty woman, with my sense of humor) and will at least look at her next book.
Several things she said resonated with me. She mentioned she was really only good at one thing - writing - and felt it had been a blessing, when she compared her path to that of her multi-talented friends who could not decide which pursuit would allow them to best express their gifts.
This is something I struggle with, because of the very time-consuming "day job" I have (it is actually a lot more than a day job: it is a day job, an evening job, and often also a weekend job, I snatch a few hours to write late at night before going to bed, or on Sunday mornings). I often wonder whether I would be better able to create the novels I have in mind if I did not have a career outside writing, and the thought that the publication a novel will be delayed by years because I cannot physically find the time to write due to homework, course projects and research papers often gives me pause.
Does my academic job take me away from my goal? The truth is more complicated than that. Teaching provides me with an immediate reward, a sense that the day has not been wasted: I gave a lecture, I shared a technique with my students, I equipped them with better tools to enter the workforce. It also provides me with a structure, which I have found very helpful; I enjoy human interactions unrelated to the writing project at hand. The job, as time-intensive that it is, gives me a sense of balance.
Certainly, writing all day long every day would be nice. Maybe I will reach a point in my life, many years from now, where I will be able to do that. For now I am learning to make my peace with the different sides of me. And in contrast with the author of Eat, Pray, Love, who produced a five-hundred-page manuscript to follow her runaway bestseller but realized right before sending it to her editor that it was such a complete failure she could not salvage anything, would have (after a bit of writer's block) to throw it away and start from scratch, I can crumple drafts without second thought and dunk them into the wastebasket, knowing that I have accomplished other things that day, concrete things: a lecture, a research meeting, a theorem proved.
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