This is going to come as no surprise to any full-time author, but writing has rarely been a lucrative career choice. According to the Author’s Guild, the median pay for full-time writers in 2019 was $14,300. Most writers need to supplement their income with speaking engagements or teaching. I learned this lesson years ago writing jokes for various comedians. Any notion I had of getting rich writing material for fellow University of Arizona comics performing at the Wild Cat House, was quickly dispelled.
So, I took a job with an office maintenance company. I was cleaning toilets for a living (on the night shift, for crying out loud). I didn’t even rate cleaning bathrooms during the day. My bosses actually thought to themselves, “Yeah, Enss is good, she’s real good. She’s just not ready for The Show yet.” Thirty-five years and more than fifty published books later, I’m still holding down other jobs to supplement my writing income.
Holding onto a less-than-inspiring day job to pay the bills while pursuing your passion as a writer is not a new phenomenon. It’s worth recalling that many famous authors throughout history have kept their day jobs, whether for the financial security, or because they wanted to pursue different passions.
Harper Lee wrote To Kill a Mockingbird in her free time while working as a ticket agent for Eastern Airlines and British Overseas Airways Corporation. She had dropped out of law school and moved to New York to pursue her writing career but realized quickly she’d need to do something else to boost her income besides writing articles and short stories for various magazines.
Zane Grey’s day job was as a dentist, and he hated it. After marrying his wife Dolly in 1905, he closed the practice he’d been running for nine years to focus on his literary career. The couple then lived off Dolly’s inheritance.
Agatha Christie was employed as a pharmacist assistant for several years. She parlayed her knowledge of pharmaceuticals in many of her novels, the first of which, Hercule Poirot’s Mysterious Affair at Styles, was published in 1920.
John Steinbeck was a tour guide and caretaker at a fish hatchery in Lake Tahoe. Not long after he wed Carol Henning in 1928, he started a business manufacturing plaster mannequins. When that endeavor failed, his parents agreed to support him until his writing took off.
And then there’s Mark Twain. He didn’t find financial success until late in his career. In 1895, the great American writer and humorist – steamboat man and creator of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn – was way down on his luck. In his late 50s, Twain was deep in debt after a series of disastrous investments. So, he decided to embark on a worldwide standup comedy tour to recoup some of his losses. It paid off. That tour, along with his travel book Following the Equator released shortly after the tour ended, got Twain out of debt and then some.
I think you’d have to have the kind of books to your credit Twain did to pull off a successful comedy tour. I did standup for years to supplement my income as a writer, but never broke into the big money. But Twain was performing at posh venues such as the Stillman Theater in Cleveland, Ohio, and the Marquam Grand Opera House in Portland, Oregon. I played only the finest strip clubs from Tucson to Albuquerque. Not a night went by I didn’t hear the crowd yell, “Hey, get those naked women off the stage. Bring us a comedian.”
To do what you absolutely love and have a crazy passion for requires sacrifice. For many authors, nothing makes us happier than knowing someone is getting lost in the details of something we’ve written. To make that happen we’ll take on whatever extra jobs we need. “To survive, you must tell stories,” Umberto Eco, author of The Island of the Day Before once told a classroom full of aspiring writer. I’ll get to that in couple of hours. Just as soon as I’m done performing the next standup routine.
