Most mornings, I wake up between 4am and 5am. I’ve done this since I was in high school—the cliched early bird. I put on coffee, pop on my uggs, throw on my dressing gown and settle down in front of my computer. I open a document and I write. I write until about 7.30am. Then, I stop. Sometimes mid-sentence, often mid flow. I have to stop, because that’s when I need to get ready to go to work. The end of the day plays out like it does for so many working mums. Dinner, walking dogs, cleaning the kitchen. And after all of that, if I have the energy, I sit down at the computer again to see if I can write some more, or make graphics for promo, or schedule posts for my historical romance newsletter or do some kind of marketing and try keep the ever vigilant imposter syndrome at bay. I have a job, a family, commitments, and yet, every day I spend a good 2-3 hours of my time writing. I call myself an after-hours author.
What do I mean by After Hours Author?
For me, an after-hours author is someone who writes books around a job. And I know that through the necessity of life and paying bills that many of us are doing that, but I mean it in a way that’s not focused on necessity. It’s an author who doesn’t have a job to make ends meet but has a job they don’t mind or might even like. It’s an author who isn’t writing in pursuit of the end goal of full-time author but is chasing something else. What? It depends on the author.
When I first started self-publishing, I struggled with the ins and outs of marketing, and now I look back on that time of fumbling, I see that it was not a struggle with the how, but with the why. I am a historian who works in a museum. It was a lot of hard work to reach this place—a dream job I decided I wanted when I was 15. I spent many years in the (what I like to call) milk crates as furniture years. I really love my job. I work hard to be good at it. And yet, every day I write words with the intention of self-publishing them. I investigate and spend money on marketing. I work to be the best wordsmith I can be. But I’d be lying if I said I had never sat at the keys, looked at a blank page or a socials platform and thought: Why? Why do I bother?
We live in an always be optimising society. It seems like every effort needs to be projected towards doing everything faster, or increasing output, and when I feel overwhelmed by all the things I should be doing, the song Harder Better Faster Stronger plays in my mind (1). Even ProWriting Aid, the grammar checker I use, sends me an email each week that says my corrections are up or down. What is better, more or less corrections? I am still unsure (2). And for a long time, I really did not know how to reconcile what I felt and my love for my job and my family and my inextinguishable need to write. And amid this confusion, a friend introduced me to the concept of Serious Leisure (3).
What is serious leisure?
The two words seem incongruous. Yet, they do fit.
Serious leisure is the pursuit of something for fun, but with devotion. It is the focus on an activity with a career minded determination without thought that it may become a career—but it could. And, most importantly, engaging in these types of activities create a great sense of fulfilment. It is in the quiet, and the gentleness of these pursuits with almost meditative focus that everything else falls away, and we live in a moment of present consciousness. Serious leisure is why people volunteer to plant trees on weekends, why they research family histories with the determination of an academic scholar and why they read non-fiction books on topics that have nothing to do with getting better at their jobs.
Those two little words… serious and leisure… changed everything for me. It both made what I was chasing as a writer very important and inconsequential all at once. I can write and produce words around other things in my life without the pressure to succeed and have record sales and grow grow grow, but I can also work to seek new audiences and try to make my stories the best they can be. I can take risks and write whatever I want but also think about my readers and do everything I can to deliver to them a story that they love. I can be both those things—a serious writer who formats her books and buys gorgeous covers and pays for a quality editor and be someone who looks at the keys and says nope, I’m not writing tonight, I’m reading, cooking, watching the sunset. Those contradictions now sit better in me. In a rocky sea of pursuit, they are my ballast.
The drive to create is, for some of us, relentless. Against the looming uncertainty of the world, I have lost count of how many authors I have seen post on socials, or on substack or elsewhere saying that no matter what AI does/the market does/life does, they will still write. And I feel the same. The need to create—not to replicate or approximate—is an intensely human thing. And at its heart, this is what being an after-hours author is to me. It is the pursuit of creativity, of community and tackling of a challenge. It is the very strong impetus to create something from nothing, and to share that with others in a way that creates value and meaning.
And this is why I write—first and foremost, because it gives me great joy, and sharing it with others only makes that joy last longer.
And on that note, it’s time for me to switch documents—I might get another few words on the WiP before bedtime.
REFERENCES
- Harder Better Faster Stronger by Daft Punk
- One of my favourite essayists, Tara McMullin, delves into this through her work.
- Serious Leisure and Belonging is a beautiful summary and introduction to this topic.