Building a creative life around a full-time job

How do you build a creative life while working a full time job? Or as a caregiver? Or with your own physical illness or limitations, you ask? You don’t. Thanks for coming to my Dian-talk. (trademark pending).

Just a little joke there. Every artist faces this question as some point in their journey. I’ve gone through it myself and haven’t ever foreseen a time when I won’t be asking the question, does this still work for me? I am a full-time employee, caregiver, and have a myriad of health issues I have to face daily. I often feel like I’m swimming against the cosmic current to get my writing time in. I’ve scoured Reddit threads, YouTube author channels, and various corners of the internet looking for guidance on how to get the most out of the time I have to write. I have also learned from creators who’ve gone before me. My two personal favorites are Toni Morrison and Flannery O’Connor, but I’ve listed a few other inspired and tired writers below who are worth learning from as well:

I once saw an interview where Ms. Morrison was telling a story of trying to work full-time, write and take care of one of her sons when he was sick. She talked about sitting up with him early one morning, holding him and trying to write. At some point in the process the sick child threw up all over her papers. The interviewer was shocked and asked, ‘what did you do?’ Ms. Morrison said, “I wrote around the part he threw up on; I worked in the space that was left.” The lesson? She worked with the space she was given.

Flannery O’Connor was a writer I had admired since college. She was diagnosed at 25 with Lupus at a time when little was known about it, other than having the disease would shorten one’s life. (Her father died early from the same condition.) She returned home to Georgia for her own health. She wrote many times about the condition but she never really complained about it. She began with a strict four-hour schedule after her diagnosis but bear the end of her life, she wrote: “I can write for one hour a day, and my, my, do I like my one hour. I eat it up like it was filet mignon.” The lesson? She wrote inside her limitations.

There are lots of stories like this from similar authors you may know.

• Octavia E. Butler is noted for taking jobs that were undemanding, like dishwasher, potato chip inspector, or other temp jobs because it would allow her to preserve her mental energy for when she was ready to use it. She would write from 2am to 4am before heading to work. Lesson? She prioritized her creativity.
• Alice Munro was another mom trying to find a way to write. She had 3 kids and couldn’t figure out how to write her novel, so she pivoted to short stories because they fit perfectly into nap times. She then went on to master short stories and won herself a Nobel prize. When asked how she did it, she said,” I wrote when I could.”
• Anthony Trollope worked full-time for the British Postal Service for 30 years and wrote most of his work at the same time.  His method, keep it measurable. He aimed to write 250 words within 15 minutes. By writing 3 hours a day, starting at 5:30 am, he could roughly achieve 2,500 words a day. In his life he wrote 47 full novels, 42 short stories, 5 travel books, 2 plays and huge amounts of interviews, essays, biographies, and his own autobiography. Lesson? How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.
• And I also like Ursula K Le Guin’s technique. Another mother (shout out to all mothers here) Ursula believed there was no perfect method or system that you needed to build. Her success was built simply by acknowledging the different seasons of life that she was in. The person you were at 25 is not the person you are at 58. It’s okay to reflect, restructure and rebuild as you go. Lesson? As you change so will your needs, so just work with what works for you when it’s working.

So, there you go, this is your creative vision and you get to build it any way you want. Do it around the kids, do it when you’re physically/energetically able to, do it before work, after work, on break. The only takeaway you need, just do it how it works best for you. And if it’s not working, just try something else. Never stop writing.