Question: What if your passion doesn't pay the bills?

Even though I would love to eventually make a career out of writing, there’s something about this real life gritty stuff that fuels my comedy. I try to take advantage of the situation that I’m in as well and not just complain about hating my job all day. A lot of my ideas do come from the stuff I see at work.

There’s this romantic feeling that being a full-time artist is the goal, but that doesn’t have to be the goal, or shouldn’t be necessarily. There are so many artists that are super successful that also diversify the sorts of projects they work on. It’s not shameful to be a working artist or to have other interests that you’re also pursuing.

I teach English 101 and English 102 at a Community College. I’ve done it for over a decade now. It’s allowed me to stay here. I don’t make as much as a normal college instructor would but I can live my life here, which has been important for me. I get into a writing routine when I’m working on a book. On weekends I work hard, in the evenings I work for an hour, too. But teaching is so important for the megalomania of the artist.

I discovered for a time that actually having a bi-weekly paycheck helped me be mentally in a place where my creativity was in a better flow. Even though I didn’t have that much time.

It’s certainly easier to push off my own creative projects than it is to push off the day job, especially when my day job is in a creative field. So it’s not like I’m just working a generic office job, I am working with other people’s art all day. So it’s harder to slough off that responsibility. It’s difficult.

I have to set time aside a year in advance, and hold it sacred. That’s advice that people give a lot of folks when they’re saying, “Oh, how do you make time for a creative process when you’ve got kids, or a day job or a million, laundry, a raccoon infestation in your basement?” Whatever it is, you need to carve out time, and descend it.

A wise person told me that it’s foolish to think that you can’t write a novel if you have a full-time job. That was reassuring, because I do have other jobs. It makes it much more difficult, certainly…I find now that it is a little bit harder to keep that rate up of productivity. I think that’s why people shift to the morning hours when they have jobs, or other obligations, because at least you’re fresh in the morning. I can’t write at night at all anymore.

I’m really glad that I found a day job in arts administration when I was younger because I was working alongside artists and learning a lot about how things succeed and how they fail. I was working on grant stuff and that enabled me to pay the bills.

Discipline is freedom. You have to be accountable to something. It’s not all freeform, do what you want. You’ve got to go out there, put some thought behind the thing, and figure out what it is that you’re going after, in all respects.

I think about what it would be like not to need a job sometimes. It’s that classic winning the lottery question—people who say, “Even if I won the lottery, I’d still keep my job.” I’d probably keep a teaching gig, even if I didn’t need to.

I moved to San Francisco and pretty quickly I got a job teaching outside the city, which was crazy. I was offered a job right away. The day I was supposed to start I was just like, “Man, I cannot get on this track.” There’s this other thing I want to do. If I don’t stop everything now and do it, it’s just not going to happen. I’m going to be a professor, it’s going to be too hard—or too risky—to try and do anything else after that happens.”

I worked at a restaurant, and I’ve done many other side jobs. You just, at some point, have to come to the realization that all industries are fucked, because we live under capitalism. For me, personally, pursuing musicianship or artistry as a job just makes sense in a practical way, because I spend all my time doing this, so it would be nice to just get paid for it, rather than saying, “I don’t want to have to think about money with this. I want to make my money from something else.” I don’t have enough hours in the day to do that.