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Meg Waite Clayton

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March 9, 2015 By Meg Waite Clayton

Elizabeth Collison: writing while holding a day job

I have a two guests this week, so I’m doing for the first time ever morning and evening posts. This morning’s is Elizabeth Collison, whom I met through her editor at HarperCollins, the amazing Hannah Wood. Elizabeth’s debut novel, Some Other Town, is “Wry, peculiar, and compelling” according to NPR.org, which goes on to say, “The novel asks: how do you restart a stalled life? It’s not a new question, but Some Other Town is certainly a funny, fresh, and real answer.” Elizabeth received her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has worked as a graphic artist and technical writer–experience that has served her well as a writer in ways she shares here today. – Meg

Elizabeth Collison: Writing while holding a day job

Some-Other-Town-Cover Until recently, I worked full time for a large corporation. I had in fact worked there for years. But then a few months ago, I left my job. And last month my first novel was published.
I did not quit my job because of the novel. I do in fact need to work, in many ways it makes the writing possible, and not only because it feeds and houses me while I am at it. You could say that really what I work for are the company benefits, something that I will get to. But first, some background on workplace. That is, my particular experience with workplace.
My recent job at a corporation was not my first. Among other jobs I’ve held, I have worked as a bartender in a pizza joint, also as a restaurant part-time grinder of fresh meat. I have worked planting seedlings in a tree nursery. And for a couple of years, I was an adjunct college instructor, teaching classes in fiction writing and poetry.
For the most part, I did not mind the jobs in restaurants and nurseries, they were easy to excuse as just day jobs. But I did not much care for teaching writing. It cut too close, and I could not help feeling it was, at its heart, a con job. At the time that I taught, I was too young, I knew too little, had published almost nothing at all. What did I know of writing? And at any rate, can you really teach writing? How dare I tell undergraduates what is what. I felt like a clown and one day a student said that it showed. “You are always half smiling at the things that you tell us. It’s like you are in on a joke.” And I knew then I had to quit. I was not taking it seriously—how could they?I resigned at the end of the semester, and because I was living at the time in northern California, people told me I should move south to look for a job. There was this place, they said, Silicon Valley. You’ll find work there that pays well.
So I did, I moved south and found a job, if one not particularly well paid. I became a writer of marketing material for a mainframe computer corporation. Mainframes no longer exist, haven’t for years. But at the time, the company I worked for was one of the famous mainframe makers. So I figured they knew what they were doing, and I watched the others there to learn how things worked, what the corporate rules were, what was expected to be said and done. Then I did the expected, and at the corporation’s quarterly meeting a few months on, I received an award for my first project, brochures for a new set of mainframes to be called the Navigator Series. And yet, I myself did little. I supervised. I directed. I consulted on copy. But I did not write a word. As it turned out, the Navigator Series did not do much either, it never happened at all. And later the company was gone too.
I moved on to work for other corporations. I began writing more, but in a technical, not marketing, vein. And corporations became my day job, my big-girl waitress job. I told myself the work did not matter to me. Certainly, I knew, I did not matter to it. On my floor, I was simply the wordsmith, a dismissive term among engineers. And eventually, just as with the adjunct teaching, our mutual disregard began to show. On my annual review, this demerit in the category Teamwork: Rolls eyes in meetings.
Elizabeth-Collison-author-photoAnd yet, all this work in the world has been useful to my writing, and I would not trade it for what some call the writing life. The reasons?

  • I learned to write to spec and on deadline.
  • Which in turn taught me to focus, to complete.
  •  I learned to manage my time, more importantly to value time. Like any working person who also wants to write, I learned to find or steal the precious hours: late nights after work, weekends, early mornings typing in the photo lab before the others arrived. Then also in the many moments between, scribbling plot twists during meetings, editing pages on the treadmill at lunch.
  • I learned the world is full of interesting people, ones I would not have found without work. And I discovered the richness and secrets there. It is an odd thing—you can know your coworkers as a kind of insider, as no one from outside work could, maybe not even a spouse. And yet, you can know little of the person’s life other than work. What mysterious beings, then, coworkers are.
  • From them, I attained some perspective on literature. That it does not always mean much to other people. That their lives and worlds are already full, without having to read about lives and worlds of others, without having to read much at all.
  •  Still, I found my coworkers did not mind hearing a good story now and then. Or telling one themselves. And it is this that I’ve cherished perhaps most about work. How full it is of good stories.
  • – Elizabeth

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    Meg Waite Clayton

    Meg Waite Clayton is a New York Times and internationally bestselling author of THE LAST TRAIN TO LONDON, a Jewish Book Award finalist based on the true story of the Kindertransport rescue of ten thousand children from Nazi-occupied Europe—and one brave woman who helped them escape. Her six prior novels include the Langum-Prize honored The Race for Paris and The Wednesday Sisters, one of Entertainment Weekly's 25 Essential Best Friend Novels of all time. A graduate of the University of Michigan and its law school, she has also written for the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, Forbes, Runners World, and public radio, often on the subject of the particular challenges women face. megwaiteclayton.com

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