Is a 40 hours a week, non-intellectual job compatible with reading and writing?

Kafka's example is relevant.

Yes.

Trollope wrote 42 novels working only three or four hours a day in the morning before his job. You could easily write a fourth or a fifth of that and really hone the prose.

You don't actually need more time than five or six hours a day to read and write if you have the potential to be a good writer. You just have to do it steadily for several decades.

The only people who actually need 12 hours a day to write are people who do hackwork and have to generate volume in order to get sales.

It's actually better in this day and age to be free of supporting yourself with your writing because the writing market is so dismal you end up writing commercial garbage.

You're much better off writing for T.V if you want to make a living writing.

BTW, examples of authors with dayjobs while they wrote work that is regarded at least in some quarters as good.

T.S Eliot - Banker
Wallace Stevens - Executive
Chekhov - Doctor
Kafka - Insurance agent
Borges - Librarian
Larkin - Librarian
Carver - lots of odd jobs.
Murakami - Bartender
Saunders- Technical writing.

There's not a ton of blue-collar stuff that overlaps with the writing period, but there are several authors like London, Burroughs, Dickens, Orwell, etc, whose blue collar jobs provided experiences that feature in their literary output and who stepped out of these sorts of jobs with writing.

It's important to remember that there used to be a much larger market for literature than there is now, and also important to point out that the education that underlies many of these day jobs is the kind of thing that suggests the background that makes a reader and therefore a writer.

It's not strictly indicated that blue collar writers can't be great because of the job. It might be just as true that there aren't as many because they don't read as much, etc.

There's also a bit of a dilemma where the great writers get recognized and are relieved of the need to work by university appointments, breakthrough books that generate huge sales, etc, and so they serve as poor proof - but of course that would happen to the greatest authors.

More indicative are the hundreds of merely good authors, many of whom likely maintained some other line of work while they wrote. You'd have to do real research to find out about this. There's also a tendency to dismiss people like this on Veeky Forums as being mediocre or failures, or to use the limits of their achievement as proof that the job hamstrung them, which might be the case but might also not be.

I've also tacitly dismissed teaching as a job, but it really is. It takes up a huge amount of time, and the work isn't necessarily stimulating as it seems at first glance. Criticizing huge piles of student level writing doesn't necessarily refine your critical faculties after a certain point. And preparing lectures, grading essays, that kind of thing, that is all boring as fuck. And TONS of authors have been teachers.

Novalis was an administrator at a salt mine.

Where there is a will there is a way.

No, you either become a NEET or stay illiterate. Tick Tock, wagie.

>most of them have no work/admin
>those that do have it at 6 hours at most

Kafka gets brought up, but he had a nice schedule if he only worked 8-2, i wouldn't mind that

t. overweight neet with a fungal skin disease, rotting teeth, no friends and a life expectancy of 40

>Kafka
But slept so little! I suppose you could keep a normal 9-5er and work, but it's not ideal. Best to accept poverty and work on your craft. Or have been lucky enough not to need to work.

Woah there buddy boy! Project enough?

Was Tchaikovsky swole??

I hope none of you get up no later than 6am

Knut Hamsun had no formal education and basically worked a bunch of odd jobs to stay alive. If I remember correctly William Faulkner was a dropout and worked as a postmaster for a while

>Sleep twice, to sleep less, and stay potently awake longer
>But muh little sleep
????

One does not simply write something like Sult, without having experienced some of the more harsh parts of modern life.

>librarian
that doesn't count

Kafka is a bad example because even when he worked half days or, later on, was in early retirement due to tuberculosis, he constantly complained about physical ailments and his inability to concentrate and to write. His diaries (desu) are full of this.

I'm more interested in some other posters experiences than in how did the greats do their thing. I'm about to emigrate from my almost-third world shithole to Britannia, leaving behind an unbearable ambient, in order to pick a job as a kitchen porter or similar and dedicate my free time to reading and writing.

Seriously, it's not hard to live with the wage from some unrelated work while writing in your free time. Just try not to pick a physically or mentally exhaustive job. As long as you have the discipline to continue writing you're golden.

Yes

Of course it is, but take it from someone who's failed at it horribly: you need a lot of dedication. Employing oneself is a tremendous responsibility that I am not proud to say I failed at with equal scale.

You've really got to know yourself if you want to make it work, because it simply won't for many people.

>>One does not simply

Nice nine-gag meme XD

You're a shitskin wanting to live on government fees so you can jerk off all day

Where are you going op? I'm a Brit I left, the rest of the world is not better.

I still don't know. Probably not London, heard it's just as easy to find a job in cheaper and less competitive cities. I might settle in Ireland too.

If you want to wash dishes I'd go somewhere nicer than London because you can do that anywhere and make more money. I recommend Bristol/bath/York. If you live in London you will struggle to pay rent.

Yeah I had Bristol in mind. I'll probably decide this month.
Btw do you know if british kitchen porters work 8 hours a day and that's it? How common is it to work unpaid extra hours?

It's honestly difficult af. I only have time to read. But I'm getting used to work now, so I think I'll try to start writing again.

>t. recently employed wagecuck

They'll never be unpaid in the UK. I'm a chef, and I've had porters work anything from 10 to 4 hours a day depending on the place.

When will I get told for how long I'll have to work that day?

Maybe. But the moment you go to the gym and also draw with the intention to get beyond stickman-level you'll realize that it doesn't work.

Probably even harder if you aren't an isolated nofriends person like me.

There are very few wagecucks in literary history.

I get up at 1pm, so much earlier

A week in advance usually.

Good enough

Bitch I work 60 hour weeks building fences and still make time to read.

Hyusmans worked as a civil servant for 30 years

i went to school and worked full time, still read and wrote, I admit the writing was slim, but I read a book every 2 weeks, at least

I think it depends on the job. I've worked soul draining jobs where you feel like nothing but an input of labor and a lot of the time spent not working ends up going towards mental and physical maintenance, while creative output suffers, but I've also had a few jobs that energized me and gave me worthwhile experiences and relationships to draw on that I probably couldn't or wouldn't have had otherwise. In my experience jobs in the former category definitely outnumber those in latter though, so while they're not totally incompatible with a Veeky Forums life, I'd say on average they're probably a hindrance.

You only need around 2-3 hours a day free to write a little a day. Anyone can get home at 5:30, eat, then write from 6-8. Then you can get comfy and read in bed later on.