For instance, my wife will call me during the day and ask me “Could you please come over to the school, Mrs. McCabe is having a problem with her printer.” Or my ten year old will call me some morning, “Dad, I forgot my lunch. Could you bring it to me?”
Now, if I were to reverse this process and call my wife and ask her to leave her classroom to run some errand for me, not only would she refuse, she would be puzzled that I could even ask such a thing. “I’m at work, I’ve got students to attend to, I can’t just drop it all and go get you a new ink cartridge. Get your own ink cartridge!”
Likewise, I’ll get a call from one of my friends. For instance, last week, one of them called me and asked, “So what are you doing this morning?”
“Well, writing…”
“Do you think you could help me move a refrigerator?”
How many of your friends would you call on a Tuesday morning at
If I worked construction or fast food, I’m sure I wouldn’t get calls like that anymore. But somehow, because I’m writing, and because my commute is the distance from my bedroom, to the coffee pot, to my desk in my home office, no one thinks twice about interrupting my day and making demands on my time.
Thus, I’m the one to pick up the children from school half the time. My wife explains that she “needs time to work in her classroom after school and catch up on some things.” Never mind that I have a book to write and I have a deadline fast approaching. Or that the children are students at her school.
If I suggest to my family or friends that I really need to write when they ask me to run an errand, they get annoyed with me. “You make your own hours,” they protest. Well, yeah, except that everyone around me seems to be more in charge of my schedule than I am. And there are only so many hours in a day. I really can’t manufacture them. And my sort of work doesn’t happen very well if there are people around, so it’s not like I can make up the lost time by working in the evening or weekends, because in the evening and weekends, my family is home. Unlike during the day when they are using me as an errand boy.
When my family is actually in the house, I can’t get much writing done. Writing requires quiet and the ability to focus without interruption. There’s nothing like being in the middle of a deep thought, the sentences finally flowing, and having my thirteen year old pop into my office to show me the lyrics of a “really cool” song she just found. I do appreciate the fact that she likes to share her life with me, but Hannah Montana’s words in purple ink just don’t help me get mine onto the page.
Of course, the nature of writing probably contributes to how my friends and family perceive my job. My wife doubtless finds it hard to imagine that when she peeks into my office and finds me staring at the wall, tapping a pencil on my desk, that I’m actually doing something productive.
People make jokes about the “Men Working” signs along the roadside, where one guy in a hole is swinging a shovel, while four guys are standing around the hole watching him dig. When we think of work, we think of something happening: dirt being piled up, bricks being laid, items being repaired, stuff being put together, papers being sorted. There should be movement. A man staring at a wall with a cold cup of coffee clutched in one hand just doesn’t seem productive.
And yet, fingers moving on a keyboard and letters appearing on the screen of my computer is only a fraction of what’s involved in writing. Thinking is part of the process, too. Really! There has to be cogitation and the mulling over of things in my head before words can appear. Long stretches of quiet, sometimes interspersed with snoring, are necessary preludes to furious keyboard pounding.
Research is also a necessary part of writing, whether it is a novel or a non-fiction book on the characters from the Bible. “Yes, I’m sitting in my chair reading a book,” I tell my youngest daughter. “Daddy’s working.”
“I thought you liked to read.”
“I do.”
“Then how can that be work?”
“You haven’t read too many academic texts with titles like, Polar Structures in the Book of Qohelet, have you?”
My daughter stares blankly at me, makes a silly face, and runs off.
Proving that I’m hard at work became even more difficult to do on one book I did a few years ago because it was illustrated and I needed to search for artwork for it. As part of my contract stipulated, I was required to suggest at least one work of art for each of the one hundred biblical characters in that book. But using Google image search does not always get me the sort of art I was wanting to find, and that sometimes proved to be embarrassing—especially if my wife happened to come into my office at the wrong moment. For instance, when I entered the name “Elisha,” whom I swear I only thought of as an ancient Hebrew prophet—little did I know that the bulk of the images that Google would return for me would be of some young woman named “Elisha Cuthbert.” Searches for a female deacon mentioned by Paul in his letter to the Romans named Phoebe also wound up being equally distracting.
“Really, dear, I’m just doing research.”
I just don’t understand why no one believes I’m working for a living.