I'm trying to be an author and I'm trying to pick a career/ job that doesn't interfere with that, it cant be something for example like working fast food where your mind is being occupied all day and is stressful, needing a time to decompress after work. For example, fishing (with a fishing rod), where you have time to think and even make a note would be an example of a good one.
What career or job would be good, considering the fact I also want to make money as well? (Ideally over 100k/per year, im in canada, understandably wouldnt have to be the starting wage)
Ideas:
RCMP (in rural area, might be stressful though, pays over 100k after 3 years guaranteed)
Firefighter (its a meme i know) dont know if this one pays great really.
Finish carpentry maybe
All ideas appreciated ive applied to like 30 jobs and need to make some decisions, i cant be completely broke but couldnt be like a cit cop for example wrangling degens.
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CEO
to be clear i do not need inspiration or anything, i need mental peace, for example being alone on the job, like how if youre a cop in a rural area youre not doing anything, or how a firefighter is on standby, or working in a forest wit peace
So fast food work is stressful ?KEK
But you have the mental fortitude to learn and apply those learned skills to the craft of finish carpentry of fighting fires, maybe having to risk your own life doing it ?
If you haven't written at least one page today
reconsider the author thing. Careers don't interfere with goals but procrastinating does
Yeah I'd also love a $100k job where I'm not doing anything, any suggestions? Free money sounds awesome.
100k CAD is nothing after taxes and then converting it to USD. That's like $4000 USD a month after taxes and benefits are taken out. You can find jobs in America that pay 100k USD where you do nothing too.
>he wants to make money
ngmi
Just move to a city/town with a low cost of living and take what ever job you can get. I make like $35K a year an my cost of living is maybe $10k, every year I work I bank at least two years of expenses and I am not even trying. Will retire soon to focus 100% on reading and writing, was going to retire earlier but the shutdown was a winfall for me and my income doubled so I stuck at it. I love on the beach and life is pretty good. Picrel is my back yard.
>love
Live. But I have also done that on the beach.
Where about are you located? I’m a remote worker for a Northeastern university here in the US. I make about $50k, about $36k after taxes and I haven’t managed to save more than about $500 per month thanks to cost of living. I’m remote so I can go anywhere and lower my cost of living though.
Great lakes area, close as you get since I don't want morons descending on my quite life. Most any small city or town will have a cheap cost of living. just get away from the major metros and life gets cheap.
I’m in a town of 50k and I have t seen an apartment for less than 1500 per mo in probably 10 years.
And? Cost of living is more than just rent. Compare what $1500 gets you in a major metro and then add in everything else. But we are not talking absolutes here which is why I said most instead of all. Houses also tend to be cheaper than apartments in small towns/cities which generally have more houses than apartments by a good margin. 1 bedroom apartments start at around $750 here, the current house I rent is $550, my previous 2 bedroom house was $650.
Dude I can't even rent anything for $550 in my Eastern European country where that's the entire salary.
I don't care, "dude". have a nice day.
Move to the US, we will let just about anyone in.
It ìs a petty big shit hole, something like 10% of surface freshwater right there in that hole.
>Move to the US, we will let just about anyone in.
No you won't, you just let colored people in.
It’s nearly the same. Small 1 bedroom for $1500 in the country, small 1 bedroom for $1700 in the city. The only $750 1 bedrooms you’ll find in this state will be a shack with a dirt floor and no running water. Honestly, maybe not even that. People rent their tents on AirBnB for $1k/mo.
>town
>50k
Mow your lawn
>ocean front property
Lakefront.
In the US you need to go merchant marine if you want much in the way of freetime, civilians do the majority of the work and there is plenty to do.
I already tried to be a merchant marine officer (not US) and failed. Are there no other routes for me?
Could try joining your countries military Navy idk
How did you fail, if I may ask?
I made the mistake of signing up to be a marine engineer instead of a deckie, don't know what I was thinking. It was extremely intensive work, 40+ hours a week apprenticeship, and I had little aptitude for the hands-on work so I ended up dropping out after just a few months.
Why didn’t you go back for the other one? I had a similar experience in the oilfield if it makes you feel better. Another guy I worked with said frick it after only like 4 days.
They don't just hand these roles out like candy, at least not where I live. I was actually supposed to pay a 2 grand fee for dropping out but managed to avoid it by smooth talking.
Oilfields are intense, no amount of money could make me destroy my body and mind in that grug work. But marine engineering is similar, you work in a literal 40+ degree dungeon 7 days a week on a floating prison.
Back in mom basement learning to code now.
You make nothing and if you knew how bad you had it, you would have a nice day. That's not an ocean. That is a lake. Probably some shithole in Indiana.
Most bitter post I've read in a while
Yikes
Shut up, moron.
I think trying to find any one job which is good for being a writer is a mistake. There are jobs which lend themselves well to being a writer, namely, being a writer like a journalist or a copywriter or something. And there are jobs which allow ample time to write like security, or most remote jobs. But what those jobs may or may not offer is life experience. I think if you only do things because they allow you to write, your writing will ultimately be kind of shallow. You have to live it. I mean, be a vagabond, a NEET, a serial job hopper if you have to, but I wouldn’t settle into some thing because it’s easy.
Literally this. Only settle with some whatever crap if you are fine ending up making some bitter isekai stuff.
I'm a software developer, make over 100k/year and only usually only do dedicated work for 3-4 hours a day, all from home. The rest of my work day is spent occasionally checking into emails/chat and pretending to be working while I do other stuff. I do spend 1 hour studying stuff related to my job though you probably don't need to do that. Occasionally there are times, like when I'm on-call, where I need to work a lot or there's some stress, but otherwise it's pretty chill.
It might be chill but there’s no way all that downtime is productive for writing. I know firsthand that remote jobs like this are easy, but you can’t just shift time and attention to writing. Maybe you could fire off a few poems or a short story, but chipping away at a novel would be hard.
I'm not a writer so I can't say anything on that topic, but I do spend my spare time either on drawing or learning another language, and I found that it works for me. You definitely wouldn't be able to get a full uninterrupted 2+ hours to dedicate to writing, but if you split your sessions into 30-60 minutes (like I do), it works.
I actually do get 2+ hours reliable downtime at my remote job. I just find it so hard to focus and get in the right headspace.
Sorry to tell you homies but almost always it doesnt work out that you get to have both. While there are a few exceptions (Faulkner, Murakami both wroked full tome when their first novels were published) the vast majority of successful writers lived in poverty or on inheritance so that they could focus all of their time to their craft. Read Hemingway, Henry Miller, Orwell, to name a few whove put out books covering the abject poverty they lived in trying to make it as authors. Cormac McCarthy lived in a shack with no electricity or plumbing until he was almost 40 to focus everything he had on writing. You cant have a full time career in an unrelated and produce even decent literature, let alone anything truly meaningful. Even English professors almost never put out great novels
>in poverty
That is complete bullshit. What you mean is they were living at someone else's expense (family, friends, taxpayers, etc.). Free money basically.
You can’t force ideas. All of the time you spend not writing is either wasted time or you’re simply getting lucky. You cannot think your way to a good novel so to prioritize long stretches of thinking, I think, is misguided.
>You cannot think your way to a good novel
That's how Flaubert wrote Madame Bovary
>my experience is universal
You are never going to write anything of worth.
That makes two of us.
McCarthy was an Airman and at one point worked at an auto parts distribution center in Chicago
Quit the force at 23 and vowed never to work for anyone again, and didnt. That was long before he even started writing seriously.
Idiot. Read “Movable Feast”, “Tropic of Cancer/Capricorn”, and “Down &Out in Paris and London.” They all openly chronicle their poverty. Hemingway at least had a little bit of money from journalistic work but Miller and Orwell were literally homeless picking cigarette butts up pff the street.
>In 1928, Miller spent several months in Paris with June, a trip which was financed by Freedman.[22] One day on a Paris street, Miller met another author, Robert W. Service, who recalled the story in his autobiography: "Soon we got into conversation which turned to books. For a stripling he spoke with some authority, turning into ridicule the pretentious scribes of the Latin Quarter and their freak magazine."[25] In 1930, Miller moved to Paris unaccompanied.[26] Soon after, he began work on Tropic of Cancer, writing to a friend, "I start tomorrow on the Paris book: First person, uncensored, formless – frick everything!"[27] Although Miller had little or no money the first year in Paris, things began to change after meeting Anaïs Nin who, with Hugh Guiler, went on to pay his entire way through the 1930s including the rent for an apartment at 18 Villa Seurat. Nin became his lover and financed the first printing of Tropic of Cancer in 1934 with money from Otto Rank.[28] She would write extensively in her journals about her relationship with Miller and his wife June; the first volume, covering the years 1931–34, was published in 1966.[26] Late in 1934, June divorced Miller by proxy in Mexico City.[29]
All I see from this is that different people have been paying for his shit his entire life. moron.
>Soon after, he began work on Tropic of Cancer, writing to a friend, "I start tomorrow on the Paris book: First person, uncensored, formless – frick everything!"
LOL
As someone who has completely failed at finding such a job after majoring in literature and trying various office jobs my current advice would be:
1. Light manual labor. Like working for a post office, moving letters into the sorting machines, transporting parcels to the distribution system and such, maybe part-time or at night. Something with little social interaction or intellectual demands but where you move around and physically interact with your enviroment. Sitting at home while staring at a screen seems detrimental to creative work. You want to sit for eight hours at your desk and afterwards sit for another few hours writing a novel? I think you need some kind of equilibrium between movement and stillness. Of course this approach leads to a minimal income.
2. The other approach would be some decent paying office job that you can simply quit after a year. You work a year to the point where have enough to live a year. This presupposes a job where you can switch fairly easily between jobs, like software engineering or generally the IT sector I guess.
How much do you write daily right now and how resilient are you to interruptions? You’d be surprised, some people do just fine writing on the clock with a remote government job.
The maritime industry, ideally as an engineer or a mate.
You spend half of the year on a vessel bored out of your mind.
like what can you give an example
I think it would actually depend on what you want to write.
Example:Comp-sci and technical writing is cool, but if that's not your realm, you're going to stagnate and it'll grind at you. I love sci-fi and I love my job. I draw a lot of inspiration from my work. I'm sure you could do whatever job and like whatever style, but it's gotta mesh in your mind somehow.
So tell me anon, what speaks to you?
99% of jobs are uninspiring and meaningless
That estimation seems high, unless you mean by sheer mass.
I'm sorry that you don't seem to have found the one that brings you joy yet, anon.
I'm here to talk if you need, though.
Do you really not realize that you’re the exception and not the rule if you find your job remotely inspiring?
I'm an exception, absolutely, but I'm certainly not unique.
To say that I'm a rare case doesn't mean that it's unobtainable.
I don't even have a degree, I just did a thing that I enjoyed.
I later found out that I could go further and specialize.
Then the first specialization I picked, I found out that it wasn't for me and that I found it crushing.
I moved on to what I do now, and the skills I picked up in my previous work have served me very well in what I now love.
There wasn't some moment where I woke up in the morning and knew this was the thing for me, it took some years, but I'm incredibly grateful that I finally made it to where I am.
I plan on moving on from this before long too, as I want more experiences and knowledge.
I have a path, not necessarily and end-goal. This satisfaction in the path is worth more than the income it provides.
I find myself happy and full of life because of this peace.
What brings you joy?
Helping people?
Inspiring them?
Conquering obstacles?
Solving Puzzles?
Working on a cohesive team?
Spending time in silence and relative isolation?
Maybe you have conflicting things, and that's fine.
I'm sure we can find a balance.
Ted Chiang was a technical writer and said the following:
>I can't recommend technical writing as a day job for fiction writers, because it's going to be hard to write all day and then come home and write fiction. Nowadays I work as a freelance writer, so I usually do contract technical writing part of the year and then I take time off and do fiction writing the rest of the year. It's too difficult for me to do technical writing at the same time as fiction writing – they draw on the same parts of my brain. So I can't say it's a good day job in that sense, but it's a way to make money.
Takes a ton of work, but criminal defense badly needs people who actually write appeals. You can charge from $10k-$40k per right now. If you are an autist who just reads and writes you could make a killing.
Gladly would do this. Where do I get started and do I need a JD? Almost time to pay back my student loans and need to go back to school to defer them again so it doesn't matter if it does because I'll get one. Not paying them back.
Ya law school and the bar is a small bump, but every few cases are pretty interesting/morbid. Seems like the perfect to become a writer to me. Practice, material, inspiration, decent wage to pay for everything, quickly stop caring about clients so its low stakes. Its just a fricking hassle to do it all.
>>Ya law school and the bar is a small bump
moronic fricking moron.
>legal writing
>inferring in any way that it’s conducive to creative writing
Most lawyers are semi-functionally literate morons, hence why they needed to be lawyers to begin with. 3/4s of your “legal writing” is just stare decisis and maybe 3-4 paragraphs dedicated to analogical reasoning. Anyone suggesting going to law school — all degree mill universities who admit morons en masse — are parasitic losers and it should be no surprise they’re recommending law school.
Technical Writing > Legalese bullshit
I'm a firefighter. You will not be able to write anything meaningful with this career. Only times I've managed to make serious progress is on holidays, and my book is more of an infographic collection than a "real" book or novel. This job is stressful, and you will want to decompress on your days off; not worry about another job like writing.
Like other anons said, either be a trust fund writer or homeless. Also, frick the RCMP. That's the dumbest career choice you could possibly make and you're moronic for just thinking it out loud.
cool helmet
Thanks, I think so too. It was from my visit to Vienna and their biggest fire hall. Absolutely gorgeous structure as well.
You want to make 100k a year doing nothing? Lmao you need a reality check little guy