I’m currently reading a work of collected nonfiction by the late author Paul Auster. Auster is one of my favorite writers, and his book The Invention of Solitude inspired me to work on my memoir project.

The title of the collected volume is Groundwork: Autobiographical Writings, 1979–2012, and it contains Auster’s memoir Hand to Mouth: A Chronicle of Early Failure (1996). Two great paragraphs illuminate the nature of working writers—writers employed in other professions to pay the bills and provide for their families, all while stealing time to scribble and peck away at personal writing projects (some of which may go unpublished).

The late author Paul Auster.

Auster’s words hit home for me because I’m a working writer who rises at 3:30 a.m. on weekdays to write. He inspired me by pointing out that other artists have blazed a similar path.

Excerpt from the book: 

“Becoming a writer is not a “career decision” like becoming a doctor or a policeman. You don’t choose it so much as get chosen, and once you accept the fact that you’re not fit for anything else, you have to be prepared to walk a long, hard road for the rest of your days. Unless you turn out to be a favorite of the gods (and woe to the man who banks on that), your work will never bring in enough to support you, and if you mean to have a roof over your head and not starve to death, you must resign yourself to doing other work to pay the bills. I understood all that, I was prepared for it, I had no complaints. In that respect, I was immensely lucky. I didn’t particularly want anything in the way of material goods, and the prospect of being poor didn’t frighten me. All I wanted was a chance to do the work I felt I had it in me to do.”

Groundwork by Paul Auster.

“Most writers lead double lives. They earn money at legitimate professions and carve out time for their writing as best they can: early in the morning, late at night, weekends, vacations. William Carlos Williams and Louis-Ferdinand Céline were doctors. Wallace Stevens worked for an insurance company. T.S. Eliot was a banker, then a publisher. Among my own acquaintances, the French poet Jacques Dupin is codirector of an art gallery in Paris. William Bronk, the American poet, managed his family’s coal and lumber business in upstate New York for over 40 years. Don DeLillo, Peter Carey, Salman Rushdie, and Elmore Leonard all worked for long stretches in advertising. Other writers teach. … Who can blame them? The salaries may not be big, but the work is steady and the hours good.”

Paul Auster. Groundwork: Autobiographical Writings, 1979–2012. Picador (2020).