Crappy jobs and lessons in creativity

Last week, I wrote about a TV show I’m obsessed by, The Bear. I’m obsessed because the show is about creating art out of trauma, and that trauma often finds itself represented through the metaphor of the chaotic workplace—the kitchen—with people trying to exist and be creative and be human in the trauma of this maddening (yet somehow wonderful) workplace.

It made me think about all of the weird (and sometimes traumatizing) jobs I’ve had over the years—everything from detasseling corn to waiting tables to working as an elevator operator—and think about the writing lessons that even the crappiest of jobs has held for me. Here are a handful.

Detasseling corn?

I was 12, too young to legally work anywhere, but detasseling corn was a right of passage in small-town Iowa, and no one checked IDs. Companies rarely turn down cheap child labor. It’s a law of the universe.

For a 12-year-old, walking through rows of corn was like walking through a jungle. The corn towered over me, and its leaves often sliced my skin like a paper cut. When we started the day, soon after dawn, the corn’s leaves were heavy with the morning’s dew, and as we walked through the fields, we slowly became soaked in moisture.

My wet jeans would begin collecting dirt as if they were a magnet and the soil was iron filaments. My pants became heavier and heavier as the morning wore on. To make matters worse, I carried a heavy thermos of water hitched to my belt because we never knew when we’d get a water break (kids sometimes literally passed out from heat stroke).

As the sun climbed higher in the sky and the dew evaporated, it was nice to feel my clothes dry, but that would be the last nice feeling of the day. The temperatures climbed, and the hot air filled with pollen that clumped around the sweaty corn cuts in my arms.

To make matters worse, a plane would occasionally fly over the field and spray who knows what over the fields. I can tell many such atrocious stories.

What did I learn about writing from such a job—a job I inexplicably did for six summers?

Sometimes writing is long and hard and full of hazards, and you can only keep trudging along. The way to make it better is talking with your friend in the next row. Good stories offer salvation. The beating of another’s heart keeps ours beating.

The coldest and darkest hour is 4 a.m. in Iowa in January

When I was 16, I got a job at a grocery store, Econofoods, and I worked there for two years. A big part of the job was stocking shelves at 4:30 a.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays before school, and then on Saturday mornings (always tough after a night of drinking).

I’ll never forget the slumberous pain of waking up at 4 a.m. and then going out into the damning January cold to get into my friend David’s car. We’d drive around town cranking Joy Division or The Sex Pistols in a sleepy daze, circling the store in the hopes the semi-truck with the pallets of food wouldn’t make it.

I started drinking coffee to get to work and then to get to school. I started taking No Doze. I drank Pepsis throughout the school day.

It was the beginning of a lifetime of looking to substances to create feelings, to create freshness, to be productive, or just to create. I learned about pushing limits—and I learned about showing up, no matter what. These were good things to learn, but now I’ve also learned that the patterns you create are the patterns you have to reckon with, and I set harmful patterns in motion. So I’m still learning about that job.

Waiting tables—or running tables, rather

There was the cook who took LSD and left me with a full restaurant and a stack of tickets because he wanted to stare at the clouds.

There was the waiter who got a Prince Albert piercing and stripped in the kitchen to show us. He loved taking off his clothes.

Sometimes my Friday night shift would get so busy I’d have to pour a pint of beer and sneak into the kitchen and chug it to compose myself before going back to the madness.

Dancing on the bar at closing time. Drinking quadruple espressos to make it through the Saturday morning brunch shift.

I worked in 7 restaurants over the course of 10 years. There’s no better job for a writer than working at a restaurant. Because of the people, of course.

When I started waiting tables, I was crippled with shyness to even greet a table. It took me years to realize that it was all a performance, that the restaurant was a stage of human drama, and everything was more fun if I could add a flourish of humor or provide an unexpected moment of care to make people happy.

Writing lesson: life is a performance, so perform, for your audience, but also for yourself.

An older waiter once told me to never let a person’s coffee cup go empty. Writing lesson: always be refilling your reader, and always be refilling yourself—because momentum is a magic key to every creative project.

The worst part of waiting tables were the twisted, mean people who wouldn’t tip you, no matter how good your service was. Lesson: rejection is everywhere. To stay sane, don’t let the mean people into your head.

An elevator man goes up and down, up and down

I was an elevator operator at a conference for furniture salespeople that took place in an old building in San Francisco. The building was so old that its elevator could only hold 10 people, and if more people got on, there was a risk the elevator would break. Meaning drop.

The theme of the conference was the Wild West, so I had to dress up like a cowboy. Each time the elevator doors closed, I wondered if this time the elevator would fall, and I’d die dressed up like a cowboy with 10 beefy furniture salespeople on top of me.

Lesson: be mindful of your capacity. Don’t let too much in. And sometimes you have to dress in ridiculous garb, so revel in it.

Not belonging is poison

In my 30s, with mounting debts and unmounting writing success, I finally got a “real job”: I worked in corporate communications at Charles Schwab.

But a real job wasn’t the best place for the real me.

I came down with a crippling case of carpal tunnel and repetitive stress injury that was so bad at one point that I couldn’t hold a book in my hands. I barely wrote anything in my 30s. I lost myself as a writer.

Here’s the thing: my mind afflicted me with injury to tell me I didn’t belong in that job. It’s like I was in a dream, and I couldn’t communicate because no one understood my words. And after a while I didn’t understand my words.

Lesson: the more you’re in a place you belong, the more your story belongs to you. Listen to your body, and it will tell you the way to go.

Who is teaching who?

I’ve taught writing off and on for 30 years now. It’s my favorite job. In fact, it’s not a job, it’s a joy.

So much of teaching is preparing what you’re going to say and creating lessons around what you want to impart to students. But here’s the irony: my best moments of teaching occurred when my students took over, when one of their questions or thoughts would halt my lesson plans and start a conversation that might last the whole semester.

Lesson: as writers, we need to be humble with our wisdom, to always be curious, and sometimes we need to realize that the story wants to say something that’s not in our plans.

Who is leading who?

I somehow became an executive director. It was the single toughest job of them all, including detasseling corn. And the job I learned the most from.

The irony of a leadership role: it’s not about any brilliance or charisma you might have. It’s about creating an environment where other people can bring their brilliance and charisma to work (and hopefully enjoy themselves a bit).

You think it’s a job that requires a big ego and feeds a big ego, and it does to an extent, but it’s more important to define “big ego” as being strong enough to cede the spotlight. To let others create the spotlight.

I don’t know if I succeeded. I tried. I wanted to create a workplace that was the opposite of The Bear’s kitchen—one that had a certain inherent chaos, sure, because that’s unavoidable, but a creative chaos. A chaos formed by kindness and support, not cruelty.

It’s a little like parenting in that you do a lot of things that go unnoticed, and they should go unnoticed. So the writing lesson? It’s not about showing your brilliance or charisma or panache on the page. It’s not about drawing attention to yourself—but being in service to the story so the reader can bring the best of their imagination to the page.

And now?

The one thing I now know is how little I know. I’m starting several new ventures that, well, are risky as hell for a guy my age with little saved for retirement and a few health problems (more on my current ventures soon).

I’d love to just sit on a beach and read a book and dally my way through my writings. I’d love to rest, finally.

But maybe there’s a beautiful irony at work here: maybe working until the end will be a strange blessing, because one definition of life is acting on possibility. And another lesson is … creativity doesn’t usually come from states of rest. Creativity comes from restlessness.

I know that rest is good, but I don’t know what rest is.

Tell me about your jobs and your creative lessons!

Please tell me stories of your jobs—and what they taught you about creativity—in the comments below.

Because a quote

“Writers should take every opportunity to learn about other people’s professions, what their workrooms look like, what they talk about. Varying the professions of the story’s characters is one of the hardest things for a writer to do after three or four books, when he has used up the few he knows about. Not many writers have the chance to learn about new lines of work once they become full-time writers.”

—Patricia Highsmith

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