Sisyphus, the archetypal figure of toil, locked in a cycle — the image is meant as a frame, but consider it on its own (uploaded to Pixabay by user Gordon Johnson.)

Earlier this year, we thought we were moving to another country, and so I didn’t renew my teaching contract for the fall. The jobs we were going to take fell through, so we didn’t. As a result, Edgar kept working at the art museum, and I kept the retail job that I’ve been working (I return to teaching in January, and I have to say, staring down the barrel of that 5AM doesn’t seem so bad right about now – I’m hardly a fan of early mornings, but the regularity is nice.) The day job is inescapable, honestly.

We all dream about dropping it, but Nabokov was an academic, Trollope worked for the post office, and Vonnegut was a car salesman. Stephen King and Neil Gaiman are the exceptions, not the rule.

I’ve been struggling with it, myself. I have to ask: how do we keep the forward momentum on our projects when we have to rent our bodies for hours every day just to keep hot food in our bellies and a roof over our heads?

And so, after working a previously unscheduled shift at the job I spent all (it feels like) of last weekend at, I’m going to throw a few things at the wall and see what sticks.

First, and most preferable in my opinion, is developing a community of artists. People who will push you to keep working. I was raised Catholic, and the guilt reflex is exceptionally strong in me: finding people who will trigger it to my benefit was a major boon. I’ve actually built a community specifically for that: every Monday, Edgar and I go and see a group of fellow writers, we eat a hot meal, and we discuss our recent lives and workshop one person’s work. This group has been going for twelve years now, though the roster has hardly been consistent the whole time.

A murder of crows, apparently at Disneyland (uploaded to Wikimedia commons by Jesse Weinstein.)

You may say, though: “Cameron, I live nowhere near any other artists, point of fact, all of my neighbors are crows, and the crows prefer limericks to my fiction and Tuvan throat singing to the progressive funk I’ve been working on. I can’t build a community here!” Well, first of all, how dare you impugn the taste of corvids, perhaps they know something you don’t? Second of all, there are other techniques besides building a community – it’s simply that building a community is the best option. Not the only option. Before I continue, I would caution you not to discount the artistic taste of those around you and skip the “build a community” angle – they might introduce you to things that you never thought to try, and you may do the same with them. Perhaps throat singing is exactly what your progressive funk needs. I don’t know, I’m a jerk writing this for the internet, I don’t know your life.

Second, if you can’t call backup, the most effective technique is to remove things. Open up your sketchpad or your notebook or whatever you use to make art, and put a timer on – disconnect from the wifi and put your phone face down and silent. Until that timer goes off – and while a long timer would be better, you can try it with a shorter one – you have two options, and two options only: you can Make Art or you can Not Make Art, but those two things are the only two things you can do.

Henry Ford had anime eyes. And, also, a hard-on for fascism.

Doing nothing (the “Not Make Art” option) gets boring fairly quickly, and so you will probably start working shortly. That being said, I happen to think that boredom has a valuable role to play in our mental health. Not in the overwhelming boredom endemic in the Fordist project (“We Are All Very Anxious” posted by Plan C is a fascinating read on this,) but moments of boredom are hard to come by – we are all drowned in distractions, and I feel that this chokes our creativity to some extent. I think that allowing small “hits” of boredom, the way one might take a hit of a drug, is of extreme benefit to creative individuals.

This is especially true if your job has moments of boredom, and this brings me to my third suggestion, which is to escape inward. The recent trend towards mindfulness as a form of corporate spiritualism strikes me as cutting off one of the most important wells of strength that workers have. Your body must be present at your job. Your mind – your attention – doesn’t necessarily have to be.

Say you’re stocking a shelf. You’re rolling silverware. You’re cleaning a glass or a dish. You’re sweeping or mopping a floor. The common perception of people working these jobs is that they don’t stretch their mental faculties, that they aren’t smart enough to escape.

I would argue that those of us working service industry jobs have the ability to escape our work, allowing our hands to keep doing the job, but we’re free to consider other options. It is the human capacity to slip from the present moment that can trap us or liberate us. To think through a problem or a project, and keep moving forward. In this way, creativity becomes a moment of escape from work. While we have to labor to pay our bills, we don’t have to give our attention or our minds to the tasks set in front of us at our jobs.

I mean, yeah, you can try to astral project on your own time, but why not just zone out at your job like a normal person?

And when your break rolls around, open up the notes application on your phone, if you don’t have a notebook, and write it down. Sketch it out. Begin to hum it. Ride that Utopian Impulse out of drudgery for a moment, visit another world, one where you don’t have to sell your labor, for just a moment.

The real issue has been written into everything that I’ve written here: you can be an artist even if you are not at this very second making art, but if you are an artist, you feel hungry to make and create and interpret. You thirst for it. You want it the way you want another breath. If this is the case, then you’ll find a way around it.

※

As an addendum: if you’re an artist, particularly a writer of fiction, then we are interested in hearing from you. Broken Hands Media is trying to start publishing short fiction, and we will pay you five whole American dollars to let us publish your work. It won’t make you rich — but it will put your work in front of our audience, and we’re about that.

※

If you enjoyed reading this, consider following our writing staff on Twitter, where you can find Cameron and Edgar. Just in case you didn’t know, we also have a Facebook fan page, which you can follow if you’d like regular updates and a bookshop where you can buy the books we review and reference.

So You Can't Quit Your Day Job: Towards a New Popular Modernism