Frustration 4

We’ve been looking at the frustration that is a built in feature of the business of trying to break into the writing game. Last week I focused on a case study—my own. When we left off, I’d just left my job as a college professor to pursue writing. No safety net. Well, at the beginning, a little one.

While I was teaching in upstate New York, I was also doing consulting—going into companies like IBM to give workshops and seminars on communication-related topics, like how to get along with your employees, how to deal with conflict in the workplace, time management, etc. And they paid lots. I could do two seminars in a month and make more than I was making as a college professor. So when I quit, I DID have a safety net, and one that took very little time, leaving me lots of time to write.

So when I left New York to move to LA I had that going for me. And for the first year, as I struggled, I had a secure income. And then the economy went south and IBM had to cut back—and the first people to go were consultants like me. So all of a sudden, no safety net.

I remember being so broke at one point that I started making my own bread because it was cheaper. And I could buy some bologna, make my own mayonnaise [also cheaper] and live on sandwiches for a week. One Sunday night, very late, I was at the store and had just some change—needed flour and that’s all I had money for. Wanted some bologna, but alas, too expensive.

As I got to my car, I found a $5 bill on the ground. I couldn’t believe it! I looked around to see if someone nearby had dropped it—but there was no one. I thought maybe I should turn it in to the store… yeah, I did. That ingrained Iowa honesty still a part of my makeup. But I decided this was meant to be. I went back into the store, bought a giant pack of bologna, and some cheese too! And a Sunday New York Times. This was before the Times was on the internet, and living in LA, it was my lifeline. It was SUCH a luxury to take that delicious paper home and read it.

Obviously, this couldn’t go on forever. I had to have some sort of work. And I was NOT going to go back to teaching. I needed something that would give me income but not interfere with my writing time.

I’d always been a great typist, so I went to a temp agency—one that specialized in supplying temps for Disney, in fact, hoping that maybe I’d at least get placed in a job so that I could be on the studio lot. And who knows, maybe I’d meet someone who’d read a script…

I took the typing test and got 99 words a minute. The woman at the agency interviewing me laughed and said, “You couldn’t have gotten one more word a minute so we could tell clients you got 100?” I got work right away—in downtown LA at a headhunter firm.

And so the frustration continues… I’ll tell you how it turned out next week.

Copyright © Diane Lake

24Jun18

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