You Want a Social Life, With Friends
You want a social life, with friends.
A passionate love life and as well
To work hard every day.
What’s true is of these three you may have two
And two can pay you dividends
But never may have three.
There isn’t time enough, my friends–
Though dawn begins, yet midnight ends–
To find the time to have love, work, and friends.
Michelangelo had feeling
For Vittoria and the Ceiling
But did he go to parties at day’s end?
Homer nightly went to banquets
Wrote all day but had no lockets
Bright with pictures of his Girl.
I know one who loves and parties
And has done so since his thirties
But writes hardly anything at all.
—by Kenneth Koch
I have two friends. These friends are sisters. Identical twins, in fact (oddly enough, they don’t look identical, thanks to their different lifestyles, but you can’t tell one voice from the other). These friends are both artists: one is a cartoonist, the other a writer. The cartoonist actually makes her living from her art. It’s a hard living, with long hours, low pay, and chronic uncertainty. Her job is at the mercy of the ratings, and you’re never sure how many seasons you get. The other sister, the writer, still needs her day job, but she’s got an actual agent and has had a book published by a real publisher. Can you sense my envy? Does it radiate from the screen?
I have another friend, unrelated to the first two, who owned and operated her own tattoo parlor and art gallery for years before selling them off so she could move. Not a bad career for a visual artist.
Finally, there’s a friend who’s related to me – a cousin who has found success as an actress. Not on the boards of Broadway; as much as that’s every actor’s dream, that’s not the only form that acting success takes. In her case, she performs in the shows onboard cruise ships.
There are two common threads. One: all of them are more successful in their art than I am, even the one who still has to work a day job. Two: they’ve all sacrificed more than I have for their art, or at least it appears so on the outside. The actress spends her time on cruise ships far from home and husband (a lot less fun for employees than passengers). The cartoonist has been out and around a bit this summer, but she warns us that she’s going back into her “hermitage” of work and classes in the fall. The writer hasn’t had a relationship since I’ve known her, and she would often miss get-togethers with our group of friends in order to meet a deadline. The visual artist seems focused on work and family.
Me? Well, for one thing, I work 50 hour weeks (and that doesn’t even count commute – an hour and a half each way!) at a job that uses up all but a few scraps of my mental energy. But that was my choice, too. Wasn’t it? Sure, a lot of my career seems to have just happened rather than being planned, but still…that’s a choice too. Did I choose money and security over my real work?
I go to movies. I go to restaurants. I spend the day at Coney Island every other weekend now that I live thirty minutes away instead of two hours. I get together with friends as often as I can – potlucks and parties and movie nights and roleplaying games (when I can get a group together!). Hours vanish on the Internet. Some would just call that a life well-lived, full of experiences. And it is! But is it a life well-lived if I don’t accomplish what I set out to do with it?
Is writing my craft, or a hobby? I always wanted it to be the former. My perfect life is having to do nothing else for work. Am I trying to do too much for that to ever happen? I know that I often do that within my writing work itself – try to do so many projects at once that the progress on each is glacial. Do I have to sacrifice something in order for my writing to move forward? If so, what? What do I sacrifice for the stories that exist in my head to exist out in the world? How does the hobby become the craft?
How do I do this right?