Hey Veeky Forums

Hey Veeky Forums,

Does anyone have recommendations for good authors who were stuck in careers that they hated and yet still managed to write a decent book and thus do something meaningful with their life?

I'm a software developer and feel like everything I do or will do is pointless and meaningless. Furthermore, the world does not need more apps.

Are there good authors that escaped this situation, or perhaps books that deal with this situation?

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en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_writer
slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/features/2013/daily_rituals/is_the_key_to_becoming_a_great_writer_having_a_day_job.html
twitter.com/SFWRedditImages

Stephen King was a janitor, Douglas Adams was a body guard, and Charles Dickens was a factory worker.

T.S. Eliot, and Kenneth Grahame. Both managed some classic work while working at banks, but they had to leave eventually.

Kafka was a legal clerk

JK Rowling was a waitress if I'm not mistaken.

K A F K A my boi

wallace stevens
Faulkner

Shakespeare had to make a living turning out hack shit for idiot theatregoers, but still managed to slip in some good writing anyway.

Faulkner worked at a power plant while he wrote as I lay dying. Bukowski had the post office.

But step back a minute and gain some perspective OP. Everything we dI is ultimately pointless and I'm not being edgy. A career switch may relieve the tedium for a moment.

i know you're not trying to be edgy, I pretty much agree

but I envy those with more free time and more freedom to pursue artistic endeavors, as at least it has a bit more meaning than coding some shit web app

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_writer
>William Gaddis, author of J R (1975), and A Frolic of His Own (1994), was employed as a technical writer for a decade and a half for such companies as Pfizer and Eastman Kodak after the poor reception of his first novel, The Recognitions (1955).
>Thomas Pynchon, American author of The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Gravity's Rainbow (1973), and Mason & Dixon (1997), among others, wrote his first novel, V. (1963), while employed as a technical writer for Boeing from 1960-1963.
>Robert M. Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values (ZAMM) (1974), wrote technical manuals for IBM, while working on the bestselling book.
>George Saunders, American author of Tenth of December: Stories (2013) as well as other short story collections, essays, and novellas, wrote his first short story collection, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (1996), while working as a technical writer and geophysical engineer for Radian International, an environmental engineering firm in Rochester, New York.
slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/features/2013/daily_rituals/is_the_key_to_becoming_a_great_writer_having_a_day_job.html
>or much of her writing career, Toni Morrison not only worked a day job—as an editor at Random House—but taught university literature courses and raised her two sons as a single parent.
>William Faulkner wrote As I Lay Dying in the afternoons before clocking in on the night shift as a supervisor at a university power plant.

BUT consider that:
>Knausgaard barely worked throughout his twenties, often went on the dole or rented cabins in the middle of nowhere to write.
>Yukiio Mishima claimed he almost fell in front of his commuter train because he was so tired and asked that his father allow him to quit his job, which he did. >Kerouac barely worked throughout his twenties.
>Patrick Suskind was funded by his parents throughout his twenties.
>Orhan Pamuk lived with his mother from the age of 22 until the age of 32.
>Cormac McCarthy avoided work and either bummed on sofas or lived without hot water so he could write.
>Raymond Carver celebrated being made redundant since it allowed him more time to write.
>Hermingway """"worked"""" as a journalist while goofing around in Paris with his buddies.
>Proust barely worked.
>Tolstoy retreated to his parents' estate in order to write.
>Salinger rented a cabin in rural New York in his twenties.
>Joshua Ferris quit his job and didn't work for a year while writing his debut novel.

BTW, I'm in college right now and looking at doing dev or webdev after I graduate. Is it actually that bad? What are you doing? I was thinking about doing economics and clocking in on Wall St. but that honestly sounded like an even shittier alternative.

You won't have time to jerk off if you work on wall street let alone write a book.

>Douglas Adams was a body guard

It really does trigger me when literal BRAINDEAD IDIOTS on Veeky Forums simply repeat something they've heard without making the slightest effort to verify whether it is true or not. Douglas Adams was BRIEFLY a bodyguard for some arab family, but then left London to live with his mother for six months, in which time he wrote The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy.

You're the same type of guy who thinks Kafka was some overworked neurotic.

For those out there in the career world: is it really that bad? I feel like for most """""intellectuals""""" life becomes tedious and sterile once they enter careers.
The reason I'm asking is becuase I've recently changed my major from chem e to EECS because I was enjoying it less and less, but now I'm starting to question how I feel about a career in general. I watched my dad, who was a brilliant man, slowly have his life taken out from under him as he tried to keep a sinking business afloat.

I think my dream would be to make enough money to never have to work a job I didn't want to, and just be able to do what I want for the rest of my life, even if it means I'm living in relative poverty.

This is all probably pretty incoherent, but I feel like I'm either going to end up happy or at the end of a rope.

>I'm in college right now and looking at doing dev or webdev after I graduate. Is it actually that bad?
Not that guy. It's still a booming industry and a lot of people got by by doing bad work one way or another and are now being passed over for kids and foreigners with sdks and similar (especially true in Web dev). There's still a lot of shitty work going on now desu. So so long as you can differentiate yourself by doing even slightly good quality work you'll be okay.

>Douglas Adams was BRIEFLY a bodyguard
So it was true and you're autismo. O-kay.

Good answers, though they belong to a small minority.

Kafka hated working 9-5 and eventually managed to work from 8am to 1pm only.

JK Rowling worked as a secretary for a charity in London briefly after gradating, then spent a while without jobs while preparing to move to Manchester, then worked for the Chamber of Commerce and the University of Manchester briefly before quitting (some thieves stole her dead mother's possessions) and moving to Portugal to work 5 hours a day at an English school. She then returned to the UK after two years and continued writing Harry Potter while NEET in Edinburgh, eventually working a few hours filing paper at a local church, and then taking a teaching training course.

Please leave this board.

Faulkner worked for a university mail service and spent his work hours in a back office reading, something his manager complained about. He then quit and lived as a NEET in New Orleans and elsewhere (hanging around with Sherwood Anderson) and then returned to his hometown where he worked nights at a university-affiliated power station where he was free to read and write in silence and solitude during work hours, only having to load the furnace with coal once or twice each night.

Bukowski only started writing properly when he quit his post office job at the request of the publisher of the Black Sparrow Press. Get your facts straight you idiot.

>Pynchon
Pynchon wrote for an in-house publication published quarterly, meaning he had very little work to do and often had a bunch of free time in which to write. He eventually quit and became NEET in Mexico while finishing his novel "V".

>George Saunders
WRONG. He quit that job to attend the creative writing course at Syracuse, where he met Tobias Wolff and others who would eventually help him publish his first work.

Also the rest of your post is stuff I POSTED IN A PREVIOUS THREAD


Okay step aside. I'm in this thread now and I will answer any queries you may have about the working lives of renowned authors. Idiots and newcomers will be ignored or severely humiliated. I'm sick of this.

It's true but it was by no means a career or a form of meaningful employment.

So your philosophy is that you need to be a NEET or close to it to write a novel?

Also to answer your question, Wall Street is a graveyard for creative ambition. You will be worked to the bone and have zero time or focus for writing a novel.

Web dev depends on your hours and how much you invest in it. You WILL become autistic if you become a successful web developer. Basically if you invest too much time and energy into anything unrelated to literature, that is a field which is quite specialized and becomes the main focus of your mental energy, then you are a lost cause. Bukowski did child's work at a post office and other places. Donald Ray Pollock drove trucks, which again doesn't demand much mental focus.

Your brain actually changes physically and remoulds itself according to the demands placed upon it by the external world. It's why someone can't "suddenly decide" to become a novelist. Unless you are routinely encouraging your brain (and the subconscious it contains) to digest information FOR THE SPECIFIC REASON of using it in your writing, and unless the main focus of your attention and thoughts are creative writing, then you are basically allowing that writing to become irrelevant, and your subconscious (which is very very important when writing) will focus its energies on web development or biochemistry or whatever autistic STEM subject you robotically attach yourself to for the sake of monetary reward and / or the prospect of sexual conquest. Personally, as a pale, narcissistic, ascetic, hermetic NEET with zero friends and next to no life experience, my own writing is profound and entertaining and interesting largely due to my stubbornness in resisting the "world of work" and in focusing my mental energies instead on cultivating a genius-like mind, both in the sense of focusing the majority of my conscious thoughts on my writing and in allowing my subconscious to assist me in producing a great work of art and thirdly in allowing my brain itself to allow the blood and the electronic signals to flow around those areas of my brain which assist the creative process.

SeeIf you are genuinely interested in a reply.

I'm reading Gaddis's letters now and J R took him 20 years to write because he wasn't actually able to write for years due to his work. He only managed to actually dig into it after getting a bunch of government grants from the national endowment for the arts, Guggenheim, etc. and quitting that job.

You arent writing your novel right now, and i thought you could if you have time for shitposting. Same with me - i was neet for 2 years and have not write anything in this time, now i work and i struggle to write for hour a day, because i barely like it and i struggle to come up with ideas. I think i should just kill myself

>or a form of meaningful employment
It obviously was meaningful employment.

Roberto Bolaño

To put it another way YES, you need to be NEET, either literally or mentally, to write a great novel. If you "love your career" or "enjoy your work" you are a lose cause and deserve nothing less than pity and derision. If you see writing as a "potential" future you lack commitment and are unworthy of any reward in that field. If you are writing because you think it's "cool" you will never make it. If employment is inflicted upon you, which it often is, then you must stubbornly retain the NEET mentality and remain discontented and unhappy wheel suffering your daily employment. Any happiness or contentment in said work means you are a sell-out, a fake, a phony and once again a lost cause. As Nietzsche said, "A man's maturity [...] is to have rediscovered the seriousness he possessed as a child at play", and what is a NEET but a child-like individual preferring idleness, play and curiosity over submission, enforced routine and acquiescence to an ideology and a state of external affairs that you are forced to respect and participate in. Maturity is a hollow ambition. Financial success is a disgusting way of evaluating your life. The conquest of females is the recreation of callous brutes. True intellectuals like myself, destined for literary success, reject these foul ideologies, these inherited myths and means of sacrificing the isolated but proud self to the secure but stolid community, and we strive for greater heights, even though we may reach them alone and unaided, and though the mob below may jeer us as we scale peaks beyond their comprehension. As I state numerous times in my debit six-part memoir, the world of careerism and the acquisition of external goods is not intended for us all.

It was a job he held for a few weeks, among several others he held off and on while writing for radio and television. The claim that he worked this job while writing is false.

>arent
>i
>have not write
>i i i
I think you're right about killing yourself.

Glad you thought my english could be native

You're the best, memoire-kun. Any progress on the work?

Yeah, it's bad. Soul-crushing is cliche but accurate. It is just really gradual, almost unnoticeably so, but over the years changes you in depressing ways. I'm in a high paying (for middle class) career but still live like a NEET so that I can retire by 35-40.

The memoir needs no progress as far the writing itself is concerned, the only progress necessary is finding a means of distributing it in a way that will guarantee an audience will be made aware of its existence, even if that audience is relatively small for a work of such magnitude, as I am confident that "word of mouth" will guarantee a wider audience in due course and may indeed contribute to my work being described as an "unlikely bestseller" and myself as an "unknown writer unfettered by the mental chains of academic creative writing studies and unconcerned with appealing to an audience so many writers take great care to belittle and patronize in their efforts to 'make it big'". My natural cynicism however (itself a sign of my genius) is encouraging me to believe that my efforts will continue to be in vain, especially since numerous agents have turned down my work (often repeatedly, and often in ways I have found rude and insensitive). I have been spending a great deal of time considering whether or not I should upload my entire work onto Wikipedia, as a one-page article 600,000 words in length, with relevant hyperlinks, images and so on all attached / included in the text. Though should such a grand ambition (I will be the first writer to aspire to such a thing) result only in the instant deletion of my work along with my IP being banned from wikipedia as it has from numerous other websites, both my self-confidence and my mother's access to her own wikipedia editor's page will be threatened.

What job?
Where?

Also I know that feel. The Pale King was fun to read but I'm seriously doubting its moral lessons.

dude was literally a writer all his life

It killed its own author before he could finish it, so he'd probably agree.