Risk Tolerance in the Creative Life

May 28, 2018

The past two years of not writing very well have been instructive. I would rather they had been instructive and productive, but such is life, because what they’ve been instructive about is why they haven’t been productive. One major reason has to do with uncertainty.

Writing novels is an inherently uncertain activity. Both in the day-to-day—I can plan out what a desk job day will look like, but dead ends and writer’s block can play havoc with an author’s best laid plans—and because the success of the final product is deeply uncertain. The book could be great and popular, or it could be mediocre and not—or some combination of them all. Writing novels requires some appetite for uncertainty. Which is what risk is: an uncertain result, whether positive or negative. When writing a novel, the author risks time, money (whether directly or through forfeited earnings), and emotional effort in the hopes of a positive result. You’ve got to be willing to take that chance.

What I’ve learned is that it’s important to look at appetite for risk in the context of my entire life, because our brains do not discriminate. Creative risk isn’t different from financial risk isn’t different from emotional risk isn’t different from all the others. We’ve got an appetite for a certain amount of risk, which means that if the uncertainty spikes in one area, it may transform what used to be an acceptable, unrelated risk into something untenable.

That’s what happened to me. I wrote a good bit of Wage Slave Rebellion while I worked a sales job, so when I took another sales job, I didn’t think it would interfere. I even thought it might help. But I was totally wrong, because I neglected to factor in uncertainty. The first job was with an established, decades-old company I didn’t must care about, while the second was with a brand new company that I did. The financial uncertainty of a job that could have ended at any time despite my best efforts (if the company folded) led me to bringing my work home with me, which, along with other issues (traveling, volatile pay), caused the second job to balloon to fill my entire life, while the former had always stayed strictly confined to eight hours a day plus griping with coworkers over drinks. Plus, I enjoyed the work of the second job better, which ended up being an impediment—but that’s a topic for another time.

Which is why, now that I have a job that isn’t as uncertain, doesn’t require travel, and doesn’t allow for me to take my work home with me (not to mention pays better), I’m filling with creative energy again. All the focus I was giving over to managing my financial uncertainty has been freed up. And there’s no better example of this than the time between my leaving one job and taking the next, a period where I had plenty of free time with which to write, but during which the financial/career uncertainty was so sharp as to be strangling. I wrote like crap.

All of which is to say, to anyone wishing to pursue a creative life, here’s my suggestion: get your ship in order. A solid job that allows for both time and energy is vital. A living situation that’s suitable for you is invaluable. Friends and family and maybe a significant other who will spend time with you and listen to your nonsense are priceless. But they’re also prerequisites, because if you’re worried about major areas of your life, there’s no worry left to write the stories.

Which is why I now have a hard time imagining myself quitting a day job to write full-time: I worry that the increased uncertainty of having everything riding on the writing would stifle it. A good day job, to me, may be a necessity, because financial uncertainty crowds out creative uncertainty every time (for me). Though maybe a part-time job would suffice, as long as it’s not uncertain. My experiment with freelance writing proved that.

I never wanted to be the kind of writer who made excuses. I always wanted the people who made the things I liked to stop talking about making them and just make them. But the more I try to be one of those people, the more I realize how immature and naive I was. Creating cool stuff is hard, especially on top of life’s other demands. It requires a good foundation. Which will be a chief goal of mine going forward as I look at where I want to live, what work I want to do, and how I want to spend my time.