When I read or watch or listen to things, I always keep an eye out for insights into the creative life—the kind of life I write about on this blog, and the one I most want to forge for myself. Last week I read an old interview with the novelist Hanya Yanagihara in conversation with Alexis Cheung in the Oct./Nov. 2017 issue of The Believer, and while the whole interview provided excellent food for thought, I found myself most drawn to Yanagihara’s thoughts on why she still keeps her day job as editor of T: The New York Times Style Magazine:
Writing is essentially interior work, and many writers are interior personalities. If I didn’t have a job, I know I’d spend virtually all my time indoors, never speaking to anyone. Having a job forces you out of the world of your work, and into the one where you get to observe people: how they speak and move and think. Yes, you can imagine all this, but as a fiction writer, you can never observe enough the rhythms of how humans move through the world, how they possess their own bodies, how they say and don’t say things.
Yanagihara’s thoughts speak wonders to this idea that Day Jobs help us engage with the world in a way that not only provides stimulation for our creative work, but keep us active and moving by forcing us to leave our rooms. Writing in particular is a solitary activity, and it’s easy to fall into the trap of living in front of a screen and existing only in the world of the mind. Jobs, on the other hand, get us up and moving, force us to engage with other people, and at their best, can challenge us to do new things that push us forward. They provide the material that experience is made of, and it’s that experience that the creative people of the world turn into art.
I imagine I’ll always have some sort of job that isn’t writing, not necessarily because I need it for bill-paying money, but because of the new experiences it’ll bring me, and because it’ll force me to keep engaging with the world in new ways. A job that didn’t do these things wouldn’t be worth having, because actively engaging with the world, in many ways, is more important than money.
But I Also Have a Day Job on Facebook
My Instagram where I post cool pics from Japan