Now, I’ve had trouble sleeping for most of my adult life. Since the semester started, it’s never happened, not once, owing to profound mental exhaustion every single day. And yet there’s this productivity to account for. So here’s what I think is the trick, so far: 1) the thing for which you Go Back To School has to honest-to-god matter. You have to think it means something and is important. If it’s just a delaying tactic I don’t think it will work. The CSCI PhD attempt fell into this category and could not have been a worse failure. 2) write in the mornings. I think this is everything. There’s no f’ing way I would write a single damn thing if I had to do it after I came home. No way. Right now I do it before I do anything else, and in those moments the story has my entire mind to itself.

Between those two things I have struck a very happy medium, writing-wise, and it’s working the way nothing else ever has. So I would advise anybody to take that creative and exhausting job, if it matters to you, even if you’re working every waking moment, so long as the first bunch of waking moments are occupied with your fiction.

In all seriousness, though, my professors gave me much of this advice before I graduated, and I… didn’t listen. So for a year, I worked a full time job in a creative field that left me exhausted. It was really hard to take the leap and quit that job, but I did it, and it’s been marvelous for my writing.

Great advice. :)

I taught during graduate school, and found that the effort I had to expend to be a halfway decent teacher (and most TAs and adjuncts, in my experience, perhaps justifiably aren’t) was energy that I much rather would have put into my own writing. I felt that my students deserved a teacher who wasn’t distracted, who didn’t view them as an impediment to doing what she really wanted to do. I couldn’t stand how my evenings weren’t my own, either–I was always grading. Desk jobs are better for that, too. Your evenings belong to you, to do with as you please.

I remember people telling me that teaching was a good job for writers, health insurance, summers off, blah, blah, blah – and maybe that’s true if the school you teach at is like the one from Dead Poet’s society, but is less true if you’re teaching stressed-out low-income kids. In my first year of teaching seventh grade I had one student who was killed in a gang fight, two who committed crimes and landed in jail (one was tried as an adult), three students pregnant, and one “lovingly coerced” into a cultural, though not legal, marriage (the note I confiscated to her ex-boyfriend explaining the situation still haunts me to this day). Add that to the daily fights, shouting matches, threats and bullying happening in the hallways (oh! and that was the year of the Blow-Job Club – oh, god! Teh rememories! Teh horrors!)Emotional exhaustion is a real thing and it can kill fiction.

For me, really, the turning point was when we realized that once we hit three kids, our childcare costs eclipsed my teaching salary, so I stayed home instead. When my whole day revolved around pretend games, made up stories and made up songs, I found it was not that difficult to catch bits of it at the end of the day and pin them to the page.

My 4-day working week means I have 2 *mornings* off, rather than 1 full day. In a full day, I might run out of writing steam. But across 2 mornings I can be much more productive. It’s the most efficient word-production schedule I’ve experienced & I love it.