There seems to be theme emerging around my current selection of interesting articles about writing: how and when to find the time.

This article by Liz Entman Harper is a beauty. She interviews seven writers who write while also holding down a day job.

The myth of the full-time writer is a perniciously sticky one—and it doesn’t help that once in a blue moon a J.K. Rowling does come along, thereby entrenching the cultural delusion that being a full-time writer is a thing that could realistically happen. But the truth is that being a full-time writer is basically just the literary equivalent of a career in the NBA. Everyone else has to write on the side.

Each of the writers is remarkably candid about their finances, their motivations, their work habits and the joys and frustrations of their day jobs.

This is the sort of conversation I’d like to see more of, especially at writers’ festivals.  I like drawing back the curtain to see more of the little man pulling the levers, less of the literary flame and filibuster.  Books don’t just magically appear.