The Night Watchman
The Artists' Way Week Eleven: Recovering a Sense of Autonomy
For those of you who’ve spent the first ten weeks of this journey through The Artists’ Way chipping away at your blocks and settling into a writing routine, it’s tempting to feel like you’ve arrived at your capital-W-L Writing Life, but in chapter eleven, Julia Cameron offers gentle warnings about the bugaboos brought on by a thriving writing life.
As always, Cameron touches on a number of topics—the frustration of finishing one project only to have to start all over again, playful approaches to fan waning enthusiasm, and the importance of exercise—but the warning that jumped out at me was the financial one.
Where writers start their writing life with the simple hope that they’ll write regularly, once they are writing, they start to feel an itch to make their work profitable.
But this is a trap.
“If I have a poem to write, I need to write that poem—whether it will sell or not,” Cameron writes. “I need to create what wants to be created. I cannot plan a career to unfold in a sensible direction dictated by cash flow and marketing strategies.”
The problem is that writers can only be truly free to ignore the market value of their work if they already have a steady income from a day job. But because writing—as playful and fulfilling as it can be—takes a lot of energy, and because day jobs also take a lot of energy, most writers quickly conclude that if their writing were profitable they could quit their day jobs. Such thinking leads writers to place an inflated value on work with commercial potential, which is where things get dangerous. Because suddenly a story that they were thrilled to finish and deliriously thrilled to publish is worthless because the literary magazine paid in contributors’ copies, and the pesky clerk at the grocery store refuses to recognize lit mags as a viable currency.
And, sure, we can tell ourselves that our day jobs feed our bellies so our writing can feed our souls, but deep, deep down we actually believe that if our writing were truly great it would feed both our souls and out bellies.
Hogwash.
Please know that this idea that writing is only valuable if it pays handsomely is nothing but a collective brainwashing sponsored by late-stage capitalism.
The truth is, we value all kind of things that are not and never will be moneymakers. We get up early to see sunsets. We stay up late to watch meteor showers. We go for runs. We hike to the top of mountains. We sing. We laugh. We live. We love. We write cards to friends during a time in history where youths think texting SUP? is an acceptable way to stay in touch. We go to readings. We dance. We swim. We try new recipes. We tweak old recipes. We putter with house plants. We meditate. We journal. We read. We stop to pet dogs on the street, and we wave to giggling toddlers in strollers.
“But, Cathy,” you say, “we do those things because we love them, and they make us feel better.”
To which I say: “Exactly.”
Can we cut our writing free of the anchor of commercial expectations and remind ourselves that we started writing because we loved it? That we continue writing because it feels better to write than not write? That we’ll keep writing because we have more to say?
I’m not saying we can’t yearn for commercial success and external validation. In my heart of hearts I, too, want it all—the agent who feels more like a friend than a business partner, the editor whose suggestions improve my novel, the contract that buys me a rural home where I can write and invite writer friends to come write, too. But while those desires may light a fire under some writers’ asses, for me—and for most writers, I’d bet—fixating on those desires shifts our writerly centers of gravity so far away from our heart (the nebula where all the best literary stars are born) that we forget that we write because we love to write. Because it makes us feel better to write than not write. Because we have something to say.
When I was in graduate school, I took a novella class with Ha Jin. On the last day of class, he wished us luck and advised us all to go find jobs as firefighters.
We laughed it off—we were trying to be writers, of course—but he doubled down.
While he was starting out as a writer, he’d worked as a night watchman and spent his nights thinking about his novel. If we have the choice, he told us, we should take a night-watchman-style job that leaves us time to think and write.
I didn’t exactly leave that class fired up to take the civil service exam, but when I graduated into a freelance life where I was hobbling together nine small jobs—teaching two university writing class, tutoring, and several writing regular freelance gigs—I asked myself which job provided me the most night-watchman energy. Journalism left my writing bandwidth depleted, and teaching college writing was so time-intensive that I seriously considered sending flowers to my undergraduate writing professors, but tutoring was just right. I thought about my book as I drove to and from students' houses. I understood the way anxious teens were getting in their own way because I'd been an anxious teen myself. And though I didn't go into tutoring with a burning desire to teach math, I quickly realized that working through algebra problems with one clear solution was the perfect antidote to banging my head against working through writing projects with myriad solutions. Add to that the immutable fact that kids were otherwise occupied during my prime morning writing hours, and tutoring was clearly my night watchman job.1
It would have been crazy for me to actually become a night watchman. If someone hired me as night watchman for the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and a thief tried to steal The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit on my watch, I’d freeze at the very idea of shooting someone over a painting. A very nice painting, to be sure. The jewel of the MFA’s collection, one might argue, but still, I’m not shooting a flesh-and-blood person over a bit of paint smeared across a 145-year-old canvas—I’m just not.
But holding onto the ideal of becoming a night watchman—a life that allows me breathing space to think and write and love—became the compass I needed to make all the small choices that helped navigate me from a life where writing was my tenth professional priority to a life where it’s the top priority.
If your inner night watchman took an inventory of your writing life, what changes might he suggest?
Have you put your writing life in storage when you want it to be the crown jewel of your life?
Does your writing time need a velvet rope to protect it from being overcrowded by life’s other demands?
Might he remind you that your writing life is bigger than any one painting and suggest that if Darley’s daughters aren’t exciting you anymore that you look around for a painting that does?
Where might your inner night watchman nudge you just a little closer to the writing life you want?
As an added bonus I genuinely liked working one on one with students, so it really was perfect.