Is it possible to write while maintaining a full-time job?

In a recent “Dear Cary” letter to Salon.com advisor Cary Tennis, a reader asked:

Dear Cary,

I’m blocked. Creatively, spiritually, emotionally — you name it. I’m a 28-year-old writer who can’t seem to get anything onto the page without second-guessing and editing the entire time. I write the first sentence over and over, eventually giving up on the idea entirely — only to see it appear in another publication later. This happens constantly.

Seems like your run-of-the-mill case of writer’s block, right? Read on:

Several months later, after a complete financial breakdown, I bit the bullet and got a real job at a real corporation willing to pay me real money. At first, it was novel and hilarious, just another silly experience, but two years later … here I am. Not that it’s awful; not by any stretch. It is a writing job, after all, and it’s in a field I’ve come to adore. I absolutely love my co-workers, two of whom have become great friends, and my husband and I actually have money; a strange thing for two kids who cut their teeth on the ’90s riot grrrl/hardcore scene and have spent their lives in either touring vans or punk houses.

But now, suddenly, I feel stuck. Blocked. I moonlight for a totally amazing publication and my husband and I have just started a two-person music project, but it’s a struggle for me to actually finish anything. I write and write and write, and then give up. I never leave the house, even though I want to, and I always feel like I’m not having any fun when my husband does manage to drag me out. I go to bed really, really early. And I’m absolutely disconnected from everyone in this city; the scene/community/whatever that used to feel like home to me is now just this strange, strange place that I have no hope of navigating. The few people that I do know (holdovers from years past) are all doing these amazing things; opening shops, running really great club nights, starting businesses. Some are still touring and recording. I just go to work and come home. My life has become totally about my job and not the work I really want to be doing, the things I ideate and never execute. Granted, my job carries a tiny bit of prestige, but I don’t ever see it that way. I just feel old, stodgy and upwardly mobile.

When I first started to write screenplays, I was making a living doing a stand-up comedy act in clubs all over California — Santa Barbara, Ventura, Thousand Oaks, Simi Valley, Stockton, Pleasanton. I’d go on the road for 3 or 4 weeks, then come home and write for a solid week. And while I was on the road, I’d be cracking stories, talking into a small cassette recorder, then transcribing my thoughts. So I didn’t have to balance creative writing with a ‘real’ job.

But almost all of my adult online students do — and I hear from them constantly what a challenge it is to get home from work, then suck it up to write and somehow dredge up their creativity.

In his response to the reader, Cary writes:

In spite of what you believe is possible — that it is possible to “have your day job and keep your integrity” — my experience has been that the concrete, day-to-day forces, sociological and economic, that hold corporations together and make them function, will and must work on you; they will force you to choose. You cannot maintain two completely separate lives. What you are experiencing now, it seems to me, is the pain — the terror, perhaps — of realizing that your occupation must take all of you. I believe that this would take many paragraphs to argue in detail, and as I have said, since I am somewhat impaired, I cannot make that argument in full. Yet this is my strong intuitive sense: that you will continue to be in turmoil as long as you try to succeed in your corporate job and also live a full and inspired creative life outside it.

Is that true? Must a ‘real’ job “take all” of us? Isn’t there a way to make the ‘creative’ and the ‘job’ coexist? How do you balance the two?

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