On a somewhat disheartening quest for gainful employment
I’m twenty-four, no work history, no specific education, etc. At others’ incessant prodding, I’m taking a GED test in a few weeks. I’m not concerned with passing; I took the preview tests, and they’re sublimely simplistic.
I’m a writer. I have a gift for it, and I have no doubt that I can earn enough money from my novels to pay my light bill. It can take years for a book to get through the publishing process, though, and in the meantime, I have only the pismire scraps tossed my direction by the social security administration. I’m tired of living with my mother, tired of never being independent, tired of having no privacy, and so on and so forth.
Facing the list of available positions fills me with a sort of disparate despair whose profundity defies adumbration—abyssal bleakness, waves of toiling sorrow and terror, weeping, rending of garments, etc. I think the day I got my drivers’ license was my anointment unto the world of true adult sorrow, as much by product of the absence of any sensation of achievement as by the overwhelming banality and quotidian horror of it all.
Paperwork, official proceedings; the banality and lassitude of such environs fills me with an ontological terror that twists my stomach into ivory knots. I saw a dentist at a free clinic last week; filling out the paperwork was a long gaze into the abyss of life’s existential meaninglessness, as a tiny page of light between two infinite bookends of darkness.
Put more simply, I cannot bear the angst of banality. I can’t be bored. It is agony personified. This is not to say I must be physically excited—despite the inchoate passion I experience in the grip of my perfervid literary afflatus, there is precious little happening, in the purely physical sense; watching me, I would look no different than any data entry worker, tittering away at the keys—but rather that I must either be involved in a job that directly stimulates my creativity and the paracosmic ecstasy in my head, or else one that requires nothing of my executive faculties, giving me the freedom to indulge in that fantasy world without disruption. It is the terrestrial tether of paperwork and similar corporate-type BS that despairs me so; trapped in the moment, I am unable to escape my self and explore worlds of far greater interest than the mundane.
Most job listings I’ve seen are of the exactly the sort that fill me with psychic terror; listing just a few off of the results page: call center customer service agent, indoor sales representative, sales associate, loss prevention manager, account manager, project administrator—the list goes on and on and on, one list of banal duties and pococurante expectations after another. I am a person with passion, and you can’t put a person with passion in a f*****g cubicle. It’s torture.
Mind, I have no specific distaste for those jobs or the people who perform them; my point is merely that I cannot perform them.
My therapist and my psychiatrist and my mother are all yapping1 about my getting a job, for the money and the discipline and the focus and etc., and I agree with that entirely—I’m sure I’d triple my daily word count if I got a job—but that doesn’t assay the horrific, soul-swallowing, black-hole-type despair that overcomes me just looking at the job directory.
Oddly, despite my AS diagnosis, I have no crippling difficulty in interacting with people, esp. in situations that allow me to play a specifically defined role, bypassing the usual pussyfooting required to discern my expected behavior. In the same vein, I have no trouble with interviews; usually I pop a few Ritalin or whatever and exhibit the sort of shallow effusiveness and charisma typically associated only with sociopaths (then go home, crash into a dark room, exult in isolation, beg for death, etc.).
What kind of job is right for a person like me (the people doing the bitching, of course, have no suggestions, offering only the therapeutic cliché of reframing—“the search will be an adventure!”) ? Assume, for the moment, that there are no jobs that involve creative writing; believe me, I’ve checked. They all want “credentials.”2
1. I can scarcely understand spoken English anymore; it all translates to a sort of droning slur redolent of the teacher from the Peanuts animated series, but I think this is what they’re talking about.
2. (i.e. a six-figure student loan for a piece of paper signed by a bureaucrat of indeterminate competence that someone is qualified to perform a job as defined by another board of bureaucrats who, in their infinite bureaucratic wisdom, think that a given set of carbon-copied matriculations can bestow the sort of aforementioned literary afflatus, a concept whose sole redemption lies in its sheer, procrustean absurdity—Kafka as a comedian, if you will)
If creative writing's your "thing", you've got options for jobs that involve ZIP in the way of formal credentials:
1. Write a blog and sell ad space on it. If you're as good a writer as you say, your blog can be your full-time job.
2. Write a book, get a literary agent and sell it. *poof* you're now a novelist! Being the author of a really popular blog should make finding an agent and selling your book a lot easier. See: Allie Brosh, The Oatmeal, Dooce.
3. Freelance. If you're as good as you say, you should be able to get work as a freelancer/stringer. Again, being the author of popular blog should make this easier.
4. Advertising copywriter.
All good ideas, all of which I’ve looked into and exhausted.
I tried writing a blog. It is a work of perhaps 0.5% writing and 99.5% advertisement, which saps the soul right out of me, not least because I’m not terribly good at it, because I myself am totally immune to advertising, because I have a hair-trigger BS meter. It also involves dumbing the writing down enough that the typical person can understand it, which is very unnatural and depressing for me, rather like a dissecting a frog for a class of fourth-graders. Worst of it all, it imputes a connection to the readers that doesn’t exist with traditional publishing, and that connection reminds me of the opaque clouds of mosquitoes that occasionally swarm my backyard and drive me onto the screened porch for fear of their bloodsucking proboscis. You’d think you’d need an audience of tens of thousands to achieve this sort of fervent and entirely unidirectional connectedness, but you’d be very wrong. People can send you mail as a legit writer, but nobody expects the author to actually read any of it.
I’ve already got a publishing deal for a novel, but the advance isn’t enough to live off of for the possibly years before it hits shelves. I need something for the time between.
I’ve tried writing for other people, but it doesn’t work. The writing they ask of me isn’t just prosaic, it’s predictably prosaic. I can’t write about what I find disinteresting, which is virtually everything someone will pay you to write about. It’s the boredom and the indignity I can’t stand. I’m like a cat that way.
Trust me, I’ve explored options to do what I’m good at, and there aren’t any with terms I can stomach. I’ve already started the next book, but it’s a nightmare trying to focus with so much free time and no structure, and I can’t bear to watch the world continue to zip by for the next year while I wait for money to start coming in (if, indeed, it does; I don’t claim to have written a masterpiece at twenty-four).
I’m not looking for a life’s work, I already have one. I’m not even looking for something I’ll like. I just need something that won’t hook my soul to the back of a tractor trailer and drag it into a translucent stain across the heartland, which is what most jobs sound like. I’m a fastidious romantic. I can’t help it. I’m asking this forum as a last resort; I thought my instinctive aversion to the ordinary and the droll was a product of AS, but that may not be so, in which case I am well and truly hosed.
GOOGLE: millennial unemployable - avoid all the things your generation is known for that makes them unemployable.
PillowSpider is right, but a successful job is about making someone else successful and realizing no one cares about you.
“If you are not for yourself then who will be for you ... If you are for yourself only who will be for you."
"Take the position in a job that everything that goes wrong is your fault, for which you apologize and fix it."
Google: tough-truths-that-help-you-grow
Edit the two post above into a coherent, compelling story about what you could do for the reader and why they would want to give you their money.
If you're the genius you seem to think you are, advertisers should have been flocking to you.
If you are so bad at "dumbing down" to make it "understandable" to "typical" people, how did you get a publishing contract?
How on earth are are the "typical" people going to understand your obviously magnificent novel if it's written in language they're too stupid to understand?
Something's not adding up here. An actual writer is an individual who makes their living writing. You don't. Your (probably non-existent) publishing deal doesn't actually do that.
Have you ever written anything that you got paid for? Been through the editing process? Because it really doesn't sound like it.
There is an art to getting edited - of having an impartial reader suggest cuts, changes, additions and whatnot what will make your work better - of meeting deadlines, of not taking offense to being told your title's badly conceived and your fifth chapter drags but rather fixing it.
Making a living as a writer is contingent upon other people buying your work. Which requires them to connect with your work.
My therapist and my psychiatrist and my mother are all yapping1 about my getting a job, for the money and the discipline and the focus and etc., and I agree with that entirely—I’m sure I’d triple my daily word count if I got a job—but that doesn’t assay the horrific, soul-swallowing, black-hole-type despair that overcomes me just looking at the job directory.
You're 24, your publishing deal doesn't presently (and might never) pay you enough to live on. Your mom and psychiatrist are right: you need to get a job that does pay you enough to live on.
Why shouldn't you get a boring job if you lack the skills necessary to get an interesting one or make a living as a writer?
Can you explain why you think you are so damn special as to be "better than" any job that pays?
You've been given a lot of good suggestions, but here are a few more:
Busy work. If you want to focus on your writing the best suggestion I can give you is to get a job that is physically repetitive and that doesn't require much thought. The act of washing dishes, for example, is a repetitive enough motion that it gives you time to think about what you're planning to do later. I know a number of writers who do this. It pays the bills between books/papers/ect, but it's not glamorous. I can't tell if it would poetically hogtie your soul or some nonsense, but I know people who swear by it.
Otherwise, have you looked into editing? If you can find a blog, a small paper, a something that you can stomach the content enough to edit that can get your foot in the door. I've worked in publishing and advertising for awhile. Good editors are always needed. And it's not content you'd always expect. The place I'm working on right now compiles and edits documents for the government. A more commercial vendor would give you different content. I've bounced from educational publication, to fashion, to technology and men's interests, to productivity B2B, to government satellites. Lots of options. Whatever your heart desires.
Also, I suppose you could partner with somebody who's really good at social media/marketing to help you with a blog you'd write. Content is actually king in the blogosphere, but without social media and advertising nobody'd know to read it. Your stance on audience and advertising is amusing, but this isn't the place to discuss it. If you have any questions, though, feel free to ask.
Don't give up. I'm the same age you are, though with much more experience, and it took me a year and a half to find the fulltime job I have now. The market is doing wonky things, but you can find something if you keep searching, and applying. Don't let the constant stream of annoying applications and interviews that go nowhere get to you too much. And, really, Pillowspider's questions are phenomenal. Think long and hard about those. It will help.
Good luck with your search!
btbnnyr
Veteran
Joined: 18 May 2011
Gender: Female
Posts: 7,359
Location: Lost Angleles Carmen Santiago
Maybe you can get at least a part-time job doing something boring, then you could have some income while writing. One job that pays more per hour is tutoring. If you are good at writing, maybe you could try teaching others like high school students, as a lot of people are not good at writing.
_________________
Drain and plane and grain and blain your brain, and then again,
Propane and butane out of the gas main, your blain shall sustain!
Clearly, yes you are and you do. I like the way you write.
I feel the same way about it.
Yes, this. I listened to a talk by Ann Patchett recently on youtube, where she was talking about how she worked as a waitress while she was writing her first novel. She said it gave her lots of time while she was working to think about what she wanted to write. Before that, she had a teaching job, but it took up all her time and energy, so she never had time to think about writing.
Waiting tables might not be the right thing. I personally couldn't do it, it would take all my concentration and besides I'm clumsy, and I hate the noise in restaurants.
Overnight stocker at a grocery store? Or maybe a receptionist or office clerk in a place where you don't actually have that much to do? When I go get my oil changed at the local dealership, the clerk in the office where you pay is always just sitting there reading a book.
I liked working in a cash office because I could think about whatever I wanted while I was counting money. I like delivery jobs and route sales for the same reason, I can daydream while I'm driving. I had a lot of pizza delivery jobs. And one time I had a job at an auto parts store delivering parts to service shops. They had a truck so I didn't have to use my own car for that like I did with pizza delivery.
Seriously, if you want to write, try to find a job doing something that won't take up a lot of mental energy.