I know some people imagine writing to be a desirable career but I have long figured out it’s a terrible way to make money. Not only because the pay is often bad but also because writing for a living hardly ever equates writing what you want. I’m aware there are writers out there who claim to live off what they truly like to write, but if we remove the pathological liars and the ones who come from money or married into it, we could probably count these lucky ones with the fingers of one hand1. I’ve had many shit jobs, like taking drunks and tourists for rides on a rickshaw in Soho (aided just with an A to Z guide), flyering outside nightclubs all over London until the early hours of the morning, washing dishes and cleaning the toilets in a pub in which punters had a terrible aim, and so on, but only two jobs ever got me depressed: getting paid to write and working in an office, doing admin. Both sucked but with the exception of Kafka I don’t know anyone who’d idealise the second career path.
My go at writing for a living took place in 2007. At this time I was working in an Argentine restaurant in Broadway Market and I became friends with a Canadian writer who was dating one of my colleagues. She was an editor for a publisher that specialised in career guides and needed someone to translate some texts into Spanish. So I started working as translator a couple of days a week, and then somehow ended up working full time, translating and writing copy both in English and Spanish. This job at the time sounded like a dream — from waiting tables and doing late shifts five nights a week to working in a hip office near London Bridge. But it soon became clear to me that if I wanted to continue to enjoy writing I needed to find myself another job.