Those Who Can’t Teach

I had coffee with a writer friend a couple weeks ago. We are both at points in our careers where we see a path toward financial sustainability, but we need that one last little boost to get us out of the struggling artist category and into a place where we are comfortably bringing home the bacon.

It wasn’t long before the conversation turned to teaching jobs, and our inability to land one. After comparing notes it was clear that we had both thoroughly shaken that tree without causing any fruit to drop. High schools, junior colleges, private schools, you name it, we’ve tried to bring our considerable expertise to America’s youth, but the fact is, especially here in LA, teaching jobs are hard to come by.

I spoke with a career counselor about six months ago who explained it like this: teachers with 20 year’s experience in the LA Unified School District are being laid off every day and competing with them is kind of pointless. So what’s a writer in her early/mid career to do?

Well, there are only so many options. 1. Sell a book or non-fiction proposal 2. find freelance work 3. decide on a different vocation. As I refuse to choose option three (and really, I don’t know what I do if I’m not a writer), that leaves me with options one and two. Option one (the non-fiction proposal) is in the hands of my agent at this point, at least until I finish my novel and can start pushing it out into the world. So that leaves freelance work.

I’ve been very fortunate as of late to find some great freelance gigs. The question now is what level of yearly income will suffice. That’s a good question for any independently employed individual, and I suppose it’s something I need to think about. Given that I would never turn down a bigger pay check, I guess the real question is how much time can I devote to this? Every hour I spend on freelance work is an hour not spent on the novel, or with the kids, or with my guy. This is big life/work balance kind of stuff. I’ll let you know when (if) I start figuring it all out.

To quote Ferris Bueller “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”