>>24505168I did this and published my second novel after working part time for two and half years (my first came out when I was still a student). I would not recommend the experience.
Generally speaking the most problematic aspect of work for a writer is that it's mentally invasive: in 2025 work doesn't just mean that you stay 8 hours on a likely shitty workplace and leave, it also means that you're likely reachable at all times through phone and email. Plus, the abuse you're likely to receive on most workplaces is very difficult to isolate mentally: if you do something you hate, with people you hate, you'll go home and think about how much you hate it. It required immense mental strength do to this 25/30 hours a week, for me, and for the short times I worked full time this was virtually impossible.
I worked thinking only about bagging the money and getting the fuck out asap, but it just wasn't possible to isolate myself mentally. The question I received more often the very rare times I complained about being contacted outside of work or being required to do overtime was: "why, do you have something to do?" which is the only sentence that ever managed to bring me on the brink of beating another human being up. Most people assume work is life. To cultivate a life outside of work, not to mention to have another phantom "artistic" career outside of it, is unusual and will isolate you.
Maybe this all boils down to my own mental weakness, but I found that working gradually eroded my ability to imagine stories and situations, and generally to have any psychological life whatsoever because my mental space looks more and more like my workspace. I remember looking at adults at 17 and blaming them for having no mental life whatsoever, and wondering how it was possible for someone to shove so much shit under the rug psychologically speaking, and just let it rot there. Now I think I see more clearly that this is a natural consequence of spending 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, in any workplace. For me the hardest experience of my life besides losing loved ones has been, to this point, to discover that one must give up such a large, significant portion of time to do absolutely useless and meaningless tasks in order to "afford" to exist - and that you'll never get back that times, which could have been spent being alive, being aware, building meaning within your own life. Work, for me, made it difficult to both write and read - or at least harder. As soon as I went back living off unemployement checks everything got better: mental and physical health, capacity to think and imagine things vividly, mood, etc. Being unemployed also comes with its own problems (poor, lonely, social outcast) but it's honestly a much better position to imagine stories, at least for me.
