A week after returning to the restaurant, I was offered an assistant position at a literary management company. Which made things tricky: work six days a week, plus my own writing, plus night and weekend reading. It could be done, but did I want to put myself through that?
I thought about quitting the restaurant. I remembered my father reminding me over the phone, when I first arrived in Los Angeles, “Look after yourself. That’s enough right now. Just do what’s best for you.” That’s what quitting would have meant: looking out for numero uno, making things easier on myself. It didn’t feel right, though. I couldn’t quit, effectively spitting on their faces, after they so graciously took me back when I needed help.
So I do both. My writing and job suffer for it, but that’s the choice I made. On my day off, I squeeze in down time and grocery shopping, maybe the gym or changing the car oil. The juggling isn’t easy, and you have to be ruthless with time to get it done. When I first arrived in Los Angeles, I weighed the pros and cons on taking an assistant job if you want to write, and it’s as simple as: you make time for it. You (as BJ Fogg so adroitly puts it,) “prioritize so hard it hurts.”
Besides slowing down my writing, assisting has opened my eyes to plenty of other weaknesses. Issues that I deferred for years, for the sake of writing and work. These days I wish I addressed those years ago, but for lack of that option, will settle for now:
- I don’t know shit about the entertainment or book industry. My boss called me into his office, and showed me a novel with a risqué cover, a woman’s hot mouth pressed against a bare shoulder. Then he asked me where he should pitch this project, a mild erotica-thriller (in the vein of 50 SHADES OF GREY.) I didn’t even bother bullshitting my way through a response. I had no idea, and that’s a problem.
- I don’t know enough about Los Angeles, my own backyard.
- Assisting has shown me how difficult the process of getting anything made is, how many moving parts there are in this arena. Everything must align. The pegs must be in the proper row at the proper moment to have impact on the world. For every great writer who says, “I just focused on the writing, I didn’t play the game or network. I just wrote in my voice and did what I thought was right, and I made it” (e.g., Hugh Howey’s wonderful post on his success with WOOL in the Huffington Post) there are a thousand artists who won’t get in front of the right people because they didn’t do their homework.
- I don’t spend enough time building relationships with other people. Which says nothing about being shy versus friendly, introverted versus extroverted – (self-examinations rendered moot when you force yourself to commit the desired behavior.) What I mean is that I’ve made a habit out of putting work/writing above everything, to the detriment of maintaining strong friendships and relationships. That’s something I want in my life, and it can’t be done sitting in front of a computer as life passes outside the window. This in turn means…
- Work focused, not just harder. There are only 24 hours in a day, and you can’t keep adding to-do’s to the top of the pile. Pinpoint exactly what I want to work on at any given time, and attack that. Identify what can fall to the wayside, and then let it. It all falls back to elimination, followed by prioritization
Ideally, I wouldn’t be 26 years old, still waiting tables on weekends to survive. In an ideal world, I could make it as a writer without working as an assistant first. But there are too many other things to be grateful for to dwell on this inconvenience as I work and rebuild, to have impact on the world.
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Photo Credit: PCCare247
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