It can never be about outcome otherwise you will grow bitter and resentful.
As trite as it sounds, it has to be about the journey.
If you want to be a great golfer, you have to fall in love with the driving range.
If you want to be a great baseball player, you have to fall in love with the batting cage.
If you want to be a great writer, you have to fall in love with doing immense amounts of crappy writing in isolation.
If you want to be a bodybuilder, you must fall in love with the gym.
We see the outcomes of these tasks—replace them with whatever resonates with you—but fail to see the titanic effort and work that goes largely unseen to reach the stage.
Fact is, anybody who’s ever made it, finds a way to fall in love with the grind. Sure, there are goals and golden coins along the way, but what you find is that when you fall in love with the practice the outcomes will take care of themselves.
You’ve heard the phrase shoot for the stars you just might land on the moon, right?
It’s a great sentiment, if you’re totally chill with landing on the moon.
Problem is if you’re the type of person delusional enough to shoot for the stars, maybe landing on the moon is a disappointment.
Here me out.
As a baseball player, I was just good enough that possibly playing in the pros wasn’t that much of a delusion. Throughout high school I busted and trained and hit and threw and fielded. I never made it to the pros, so by all accounts a disappointment.
But I was a damn good high school player and would’ve been a fine college player. My problem was that I couldn’t be satisfied with being a damn good high school player, one of the 100 best in New England. It meant nothing to me.
But…had I not pushed myself to that extreme of playing professionally, had I just been happy to be a decent high school player, I doubt I would’ve been a very good high school player at all. I shot for the stars and landed on the moon. My problem was I was grossly unsatisfied with the moon.
So we need to have Major League dreams and Major League work ethic, knowing all the while that reaching that mighty pinnacle is still unlikely, but that shouldn’t stop us, because pushing ourselves to that level will make us pretty damn good.
The trick—and the rub—is being happy with the moon.
And I think I have an answer for that, but I’ll save it for tomorrow.
Okay, so this’ll be my last (I think) post for a while on Job Shaming. [Parts I and II]
You know what Day Jobs also do? They put you out into the world and in contact with people, and if you’re a writer: people are where the stories are.
Gay Talese, say what you will about him in recent years, but his advice to young writers coming out of school is to get a job driving a cab. What better way to intersect with people, real people.
I owe my first book to a retail job. There I was a double major, an MFA holder, working at a shoe store.
I was fitting a woman for a pair of running shoes. She asked me what I did besides the retail gig. I told her I was a writer and I had this book, Six Weeks in Saratoga, that I had finished and was shopping around.
She said, “I know an editor at SUNY Press and I know they’re looking for a Saratoga book.”
She gave me the woman’s email. I sent her the manuscript and…fast forward a few months…they accepted and would later publish the book.
This was lucky, but I also had done the work and was in the position to capitalize.
And it was the menial Day Job, one that I felt tons of shame over, that ultimately led to my first book. And it’s a good, little book for a 29-year-old. I’m not gonna denigrate it.
Point is, every time you punch the clock at work, you might have the opportunity of running into someone and that is likely someone you would’ve never met had you not had your Day Job out in the world.
Hey, CNFers, I’m Brendan O’Meara and this is The Creative Nonfiction Podcast, the show where I talk to badass writers, filmmakers, radio producers, and podcasters about the art and craft of telling true stories. I try and chart their journeys through the arts and reveal how they deal self-doubt, anxiety, and still manage to get the work done.
Be sure to go subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher.
Oh, and I’m doing the thing again, that thing that where I offer editorial coaching of up to 2,000 words of your writing in exchange for a review on Apple Podcasts. Post your review. They take up to 24 hours and email me creativenonfictionpodcast at gmail dot com with a screenshot of the review and i’ll reach out and help out with a piece you’re working on up to 2,000 words, a $150 value.
Okay, so I’ve got the amazing, incomparable and, jacked Jericho Brown. Here’s a little bit about Jericho, whose new book, The Tradition, published by Copper Canyon Press:
Jericho Brown is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and he is the winner of the Whiting Writer’s Award. Brown’s first book, Please (New Issues 2008), won the American Book Award. His second book, TheNew Testament (Copper Canyon 2014), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. His third collection is The Tradition(Copper Canyon 2019). His poems have appeared in The Bennington Review, Buzzfeed, Fence, jubilat, The New Republic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, TIME magazine, and several volumes ofThe Best American Poetry. He is an associate professor and the director of the Creative Writing Program at Emory University.
jerichobrown.com
If you want to read poetry that knocks the wind out of you, read Jericho.
This is one of my all-time favorites as we approach 150 of these things. We talk about his exercise routine, how poets are a special kind of nerd, experiences over destinations, his invented poetry form the Duplex, discipline, and so much more.
You’re gonna want a notebook, man.
Go follow Jericho on Twitter @jerichobrown and keep the conversation going with me @BrendanOMeara and @CNFPod on TWitter. IG is @cnfpod and Facebook is The Creative Nonfiction Podcast. Email the show creative nonfiction podcast @ gmail dot com and maybe I’ll read it on the air.
Share this show with a friend. You are the social network. I can tweet out a show all day long, but it comes down to you, friend. Rage against the algorithms.
Oh, and another thing about Day Jobs: They create structure, and they take pressure off your art. [The End of Job Shaming Part I]
Let’s address the first one. Say you work 32-40 hours per week, there’s likely a chance that you’ll have one to two hours before your shift or one to two hours after your shift to do your thing. Then there’s your days off.
Some of my best reporting was done during lunch breaks while landscaping (phone interviews). I often said to myself, well, my heroes in narrative journalism aren’t landscaping and doing reporting calls during lunch in 100-degree heat, but, alas, my path is my path and, you know what, it’s sorta cool.
I think people think that if they had all day to do their art they’d get more done. I don’t know if that’s true. The structure and time constraint enforced by a Day Job puts greater focus on the time you have. There’s a chance you do better, more concentrated work when that time is more precious.
To the second point: If you’re relying on your art to be your breadwinning you will find that something about your art dies with it. It certainly changes tenor. Not to mention that because you’re self-employed you’ll be paying nearly double the taxes, so you’ll have to churn out double the work or somehow find very well paying clients or markets.
See Day Jobs as something that pays you an advance on your work that you don’t have to earn back.
You remember that photo, right? The one of the actor Geoffrey Owens, most famous for his role on The Cosby Show, working the register at Trader Joe’s? The photo taken by someone whose very intent was to shame a working actor for having what she perceived as a low-life job?
This angered me so much, but Owens graciously took the high road. He parlayed this job shaming into many appearances on morning talk shows. He lauded his employer for taking him in, for giving him a steady paycheck while he sought work as an actor. As a result, he ended up getting more acting work. He’s always been a working actor, and sometimes a working actor has to work at a job flexible enough to accommodate his craft. It’s not prestigious, but you wanna know what else isn’t prestigious: missing the rent.
If we’re not getting job shamed by our family or by someone at a party, then we almost certainly do it to ourselves. You think I spent all this money on education and it’s led me to working a crummy retail job because I can’t get enough writing gigs. You think Well, if I was any good at this craft, would I even need a day job? Or you start playing the Competition Olympics and think Well, my heroes, those artists I so deeply admire, they don’t have to stack produce at the supermarket while I fill-in-the-blank.
The fact is, in this day of social media highlights, YOU DON’T KNOW IF THEY’RE STACKING PRODUCE OR NOT. THEY MIGHT BE, BUT THEY’RE NOT BROADCASTING IT.
There are myriad things worth unpacking here and maybe this will be the first of several micropods about Day Jobs and Job Shaming.
I can speak to this because it’s something I have felt so deeply for many, many years.
I’ll leave you with this: Day Jobs are nothing to be ashamed of. Think of it as a way that subsidizes your art. Make what you can in the time you have and stop hating yourself for it.
This morning I was riffing in my journal and my final passage lamented how much I want to do just in writing. I have so many projects in my head, written down, everywhere, and trust me, they’re all genius.
With so much I want to get to, where do I start? And for that matter, where should you start? The answer is: Start. Pass Go.
We’re not in this for the short gain, the short cut, and the low-hanging fruit. No, we’re in this for the long haul. We want to be 70, 80, 90 years old still churning out art.
Your journal entry on the eve of your eventual death should say something to the effect of, “I can’t wait to keep working on that project.”
Play the long game. You have many ideas and it’s stifling to think of them all. Honestly, most of them are likely garbage and won’t live up to the perfect ideal in your head.
Doesn’t matter. Start now. Life is long. Start now. Keep going. Please.
A fair question to ask when it comes to your vocation, especially an artistic one, is: What would this look like if this was fun?
It’s so easy to get bogged down in the mire of the work. I hear constantly how one writer complains about their agent and that this and that and the other can’t seem to get their work published.
I mean, whatever happened to doing it just because it’s fun? When you were a kid drawing who knows what, did you run and start an Etsy shop? When you wrote a poem in high school, were considering what market to sell it to?
Our egos are tied to these prestige outlets and prestige outcomes. We want to say were published in fill in the blank, but it doesn’t matter. If you land that piece in fill in the blank, you’re gonna still wake up and feel the exact same, so why not have fun with it?
Turn it loose. Enjoy yourself like you did when you were a kid.
The best way to not waste the morning is to have your marching orders, so to speak, ready the night before.
I call this “setting up the bowling pins.” By having a secure nighttime routine you ensure that the morning gets off to a focused start.
By setting up your crucial tasks the night before, you enter the following day with purpose. And if you’re like me, without that purpose you’ll flounder and find ways to waste time.
Algorithms are designed to lock us into the constant scroll.
I realize this even as I try and write/record a blog post that I hope people will read and enjoy.
But you don’t have to go too far back in time to remember the days when phones were attached to walls with spiraled cords that always got tangled.
The only ping notification was when the phone rang and you had to get up and walk to the wall and pick it up.
Mobile devices are great in so many ways, but I think employing an old-school filter to the smartphone is an act of revolution. Put the ringer on, but put it in a different room. Bring it with you in the car, but leave it in the console as you run your errands.
Once untethered, it no longer becomes the candy fix that it is, a kind of burden lifts.
This is by no means original, but it might be worth a try. You may find you’ll get more work done. Or maybe you’ll simply take pride in your tiny revolution.
