How I wrote 3 novels while also working a full-time job
Thoughts on writing as a second career
Since the age of twenty, I have never not had a job. This is not something I am particularly proud of; I find it kind of depressing, actually. I worked part-time during college and graduated a semester early so that I could launch immediately into the workforce and become a “real adult”. In grad school, I worked two jobs during the day and took classes in the evenings. I have never quit a job without having another one lined up; I don’t think I’ve ever had longer than a week off between jobs.
Financial security is something that’s on my mind constantly. I think it started when I was a kid and my parents would talk about how they had to borrow money from friends to pay rent that month. What?! The idea of us having to ask other people for money to keep the roof over our heads was startling in a way that kind of rewired my brain.
In my 20s, I worked at the World Bank for two years while I was also in full-time grad school. It was the experience of working there, rather than the content of the work itself, that really solidified for me the understanding of what it was like to be financially vulnerable. I don’t know how things are now, but back then there were three castes of employees at the World Bank: the first was people with actual benefits like a pension, annual leave and health insurance; the second was people who got health insurance; and the lowest class was people who got nothing. That was me.
I made about $28,000 a year while working there, and I was terrified of getting sick because every day that I missed was a day I didn’t get paid. My timesheets had to be manually approved by several layers of people, so my paychecks often came late. When I look back, I mostly remember those two years as a giant ball of stress and worry. I managed to find a new job two months before I turned 26 — right before I would’ve gotten kicked off my parents’ health insurance.
I am the type of person who works for other people. That’s how it’s always been. I am not entrepreneurial, I don’t have brilliant ideas, I don’t know how to lead (this is also a reflection on the lack of mentorship and upward mobility that I’ve experienced in most of my jobs, particularly as a poc, but that’s a separate conversation). So I write stupid little cover letters for jobs, I am interviewed and judged by a panel of other people, and I become a little cog in a big machine. The aforementioned gig at the World Bank was the closest I ever got to being freelance, and it felt like sleeping on a portaledge on the side of a mountain. I need a pension! I need health insurance and paid annual leave to feel like I can properly breathe! The idea of being my own boss? Of starting my own business? Of turning the unhinged thoughts that exist only in my head into reality? Even a few years ago, that would have seemed like absolute madness to me — until I started trying to become a “professional” writer.
It took me three years to write my first novel. I’d sit and write a few hundred words here, a few hundred there, but it was never a serious, disciplined effort. During those three years, Covid happened, I changed jobs, I moved apartments, I took a ton of French classes to adjust to my life in Switzerland. There were entire months when I didn’t write a single word. When that happened, I’d feel a simmering level of guilt, but I’d also remind myself that this was a hobby. My actual job was what paid the bills.
Looking back, the process of writing that novel was slow, but it was also really, really special. At the time, I knew absolutely nothing about publishing except that I needed to find a literary agent to represent the book and hopefully sell it to a publisher. I wasn’t aware of market trends; I didn’t know that a 130k-word manuscript was a hard sell; I didn’t know that the first pages were supposed to be grabby. I had spent the last decade reading mostly nonfiction. There was no research, no pressure, no psyching myself out. It was just me and my laptop for three years, working slowly and calmly on my art.
That book did not get a literary agent. I spent about two months moping around, curled up on my couch like a big dramatic shrimp because the constant rejections gave me physical pain. During this mourning period, I questioned what I was even doing, thinking I could make it as a writer. This book was the only thing I had ever written. I had no other ideas, and would never have one again. My dream of being a published author was dead in the water.
… Except soon after that, I did get another idea. And it was such a cool, exciting, fully formed idea that when it hit me, I immediately sat down in front of my laptop and started writing.
This was how the process went for writing both book 2 (which also did not get an agent) and book 3 (which did and will be my debut). I would go into a deep hyperfixation episode and come up with a first draft in two months. They were so intense that I would emerge from the episode with almost no memory of the writing process, except that I remembered being glued to my laptop from 9pm to midnight or 1am and on weekends.
Personally, I find that once you get to that stage of working with an agent and then with an editor, the dynamic of writing undergoes a big shift. It’s no longer just you and your little Word document that lives on your computer. It’s a piece of art that now has commercial value (rightly or wrongly), and it’s a part of other people’s 9-to-5 jobs, it’s a part of their paychecks, its success or failure can potentially be a factor in driving the trajectory of someone else’s career. You are now writing and revising to deadlines. You are on a production schedule. You eventually have to do stuff to promote it. At some point, it becomes clear that your writing isn’t just a hobby anymore. It’s your profession. It’s a career all in its own.
About two months after I sold my book to Simon & Schuster, I had a setback at my day job. A crushing, big-picture-level setback. I cried. I vented to my loved ones and therapist about how unfair it was, how Sisyphean it all felt after a decade of trying to move myself forward. “I’m so lucky that I can write,” I remember saying. “I’m so lucky that I get to be a writer. I’m so lucky that I get to write books, regardless of what other disappointments I experience in life.”
And it was so true! Because I was a writer — because I now had a second career that made me excited to get up each morning — that setback in my first career didn’t screw up my mental health the way it might have done just a few years ago, when it might have made me sad and jaded and hopeless. Instead, I picked myself back up and refocused my emotional energy into starting a new novel.
The reverse is true as well: when I couldn’t find an agent and felt lost and stupid, the job I already had was what anchored me and helped me remember that I had worth; that I was more than a writer; that I did not need to achieve tangible, conventional success in writing in order to be someone who created meaning and beauty in this world.
There are some days when things do feel overwhelming. As I write this, I’m in the middle of packing up for an international move from Switzerland to Lebanon. In Beirut, I’ll be starting a new job. I handed in the latest round of revisions on my debut novel, The Plans I Have for You, a few days ago. I’m more than halfway through drafting a new novel. My mind is feral—I’m in that headspace you find yourself in when it’s 3am and you’re in a foreign airport on a long layover and you’re drinking coffee and eating a big bag of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos because why not. This has been one of the most stressful months of my life. This has also been one of the most fun and creatively fulfilling months of my life.
Yeah, actually. Why not?