I turn 29 soon and for the past several years have worked a corporate-style job which I'm not proud of but which...

Can you name one serious writer or even musician who spent their 20s working a 8-5 mind-numbingly boring desk job earning more money than they needed while largely ignoring their creative impulses and ambitions?

>I need other people to pave the way for me
You don't sound very creative or ambitious at all. Art from adversity, user.

Submitting to stable mediocrity only means that you are less likely to put in the time necessary to produce serious art. Those famous twenty-something-published bohemianly living authors all made a gamble and won, but for most who make that same gamble their efforts and youths are wasted.

dude who cares you probably weren't going to make it anyway. White kids to becoming a successful artist/writer is what black kids think they will be in professional sports or a rapper.
If you really didnt like your job you would have left it like Bill Burr left the office desk life to move to a new town and sleep on a futon until he only just started making money basically until his late 30s early 40s. Same shit with steve harvey he was broke for his entire life until he finally hit it big when he was just about middle aged. Shit just barely happens or nothing happens at all as far as success. Their are hundreds and thousands of artists who tried and never went anywhere and have nothing to show for it. I'm sure your going to say its not all about the money, but when you dont have that nice cushy corporate job to fall back on all of a sudden your dream hobby becomes a job like ANYTHING else.

Aka enjoy your comfort and just fucking write with the safety net that you don't need to write to pay bills.

I know you want to live this romantic lifestyle of a vagabond artist but it's not glamorous. Take comfort in comfort

Most writers are from bourgeois families, so they never needed to work in the first place. There's no point in feeling bad about not being born with a silver spoon in your mouth, user. For every Ellison out there are at least a dozen Tolstoys, Manns, and Schopenhauers.

my uncle is a writer.
He's now in his 60's and broke.
Its high risk high reward user.
Then again he didn't go to college.
He still did get some recognition here and there though.

Yes many, but they don't talk about it. I keep referencing stand up comedy scene but its true. All these artists do comedy at night and day jobs at day. Sometimes 2 other jobs. This includes actors. You gotta pay the bills somehow dude

*out there, there are at least a dozen

You sound incredibly naive, hard to believe this is something a 29 year old would say. Do things for you not because you think artist X did X why am I not doing X to be like X

You're being this hard on yourself and you haven't even written anything to be critiqued. Everybody has a good reason not to do something creative but the only real one is if you suck after sincerely trying so I'd start there. I worked at a bank for 6 years and it was a complete waste of time as I'm now learning a trade. In my spare time I write as much as possible. Learning a job that can afford me a studio apartment is all I wanted so I can write without being bothered was a priority.

Real artists are born, not made, user. If your artistic prowess didn't become apparent until now you're a lost cause already. Sorry, that's just how it is. You'd do better not to force things that don't suit you.

Most artfags were semi-aristocratic or at least high tier bourgeoisie, the same goes for STEMfags.

This guy knows this truth. I'd like to add: who cares what people think of you when you're published? Does that seriously matter that much to you? Your work should stand on its own regardless of your background. If someone wrote something genuinely insightful that speaks to me does it really matter whether they were raised rich or poor?

Everyone wants to be creative, most people suck, the good ones go to the top. If you don't try you're just a moron.

>Surely there's a reason why no artist of any merit has ever, for example, spent several years working full-time in a bank before suddenly "making it"?
Yeah, because virtually all of them were richfags that were raised in intellectual environments, received top tier education from an early age and had vast free time.

It’s really your fault if you haven’t maintained artistic output while working.

Dickens started working when he was 12 years old putting labels on bottles of shoe polish, and continued to work for many years while writing.

Matt Berninger of the band The National worked a job in advertisement and started a band in his 30s

Kafka was working his whole adult life and still managed to write

Melville was working by age 13, and never went back to school

Faulkner was working at a power plant full time when he wrote As I Lay Dying, and wrote between midnight and 4 AM

>
I've pretty much given up on becoming published by the age of 30 but even if I did manage it, I'd feel embarrassed for anyone to know I spent my 20s working in the kind of job which outwardly looks like you'd have to sell your soul to work there.
You could still try becoming published before 31.

I am quite naive. It's just whenever I read about the biographies of the writers I respect, they often have lived interesting, varied lives with their 20s being a time of intense change, restlessness, adventure, rapid development and defined by a kind of stubborn dedication. The best biographies are those of writers like Tennessee Williams who simply refused to live a soul-killing 9-5 job and instead experienced all kinds of ups and downs before finally making it. Rarely, if ever, have I read of a writer in his 20s who spent 7 or 8 years at the same obscure but obviously corporate company working full-time and earning pretty good money while publishing nothing and living the life of a 30-year-old boomer.

A few years ago in my mid-20s I felt my instincts urging me to resign from my job (same on as now) because unless I followed my creative passion they, my instincts, would give up on me and wouldn't provide that wild urge and drive again. Now, years later, having not followed those instincts, my prediction has come true and I'm rarely caught up in that kind of creative passion that a few years ago made me convinced I could write for eight hours straight etc.

How is that going?

Weirdly I was just thinking about The National and was going to mention their example.

Kafka worked only part-time specifically because he thought working longer hours would kill his literary ambition.

Melville I don't think worked for many years after he returned from his whaling expedition in his early 20s. From the looks of it he married into money and only returned to working in his late 40s as some kind of clerk.

>Kafka worked only part-time specifically because he thought working longer hours would kill his literary ambition.
This is probably true. I feel like I have no free time at all working full time, on the weekends I lack the energy to do much of anything.

Someone else gave the example of Eliot, he was working a 40 hour week at a bank for 8 years, and published his most famous and anthologies day poem right in the middle of that time.

Then take the money you have now and go live a new life. Start a more fullfilling chapter. Just because you're 29 doesn't mean you can't live like you're 23. The numbers are arbitary. You're bascially the same man as you were 6 years ago, except you have more money.

Poetry is quite different to novel writing or short stories even, and Eliot was afaik already a part of the in-crowd of British literature at the time, meaning he could already be sure his work would be considered and taken seriously.

Do you follow your creative passions now? I'm not hearing about you attempting to produce anything at all now. It sounds like you think you can write for hours and hours on end. It just to me feels like you want to do writing as much as somebody who sings in the shower wants to be a professional singer but at least their practicing.

I don't usually reply to threads, but I was feeling the same exact way as you a little while ago.

You can make experiences while you work. Use your vacation time to go to a cabin somewhere and finish a first draft. Take a couple weeks and go somewhere last minute by yourself. Just do stuff, if thats what you want to do.

All that really matters is you read and write. In all honesty it sounds like you just want an excuse to quit your job. That's okay, I felt that before too. But it's not necessary. You simply are ignoring the writers who have worked and written. As others have mentioned, Hemingway, Faulkner, Melville, dickens, Hesse, Garcia Marquez, you name it, that's just a couple of names I picked off my bookshelf next to me. Another user pointed out TS Eliot worked in a bank himself while he wrote the waste land.

Also, user, you have to consider the possibility that just maybe you aren't as good as you think you are. That's okay, too. You aren't betraying your craft by having a back-up. I am a PhD student in Physics since I'm fascinated by how the universe works and find it blends easily with philosophy. I take heart from the knowledge Goethe, one of the greatest creative minds of all time, was also something of a scientist. What if you don't make it? What if you make it a little bit, publish a novel or two, and realise it's not sustainable? Don't fall for that mistake

Him, and most of the similar examples also had superior education. This should not be discounted.

Also, just from personal experience, if you want to create then you will. I used to work manual labour in a factory when I was 18, just when I was starting to take writing and literature seriously, and I went to bed early so I could get up and write an hour before work. I then tired myself out physically, came home and read for a few hours in the evening before going to bed. To this day I haven't been able to replicate the unbelievable breadth of improvement I saw in my craft as I saw then, working a menial job designed to crush the imagination. Where there's a will there's a way.

Okay well then how about Dickens and Melville, they were basically dropouts as preteens and worked blue collar jobs during their youth

Basically meaning OP is just fucking LARPING in is head. havent heard about him attempting to write anything at all and that work is getting in the way of it.

It's like giving a guy a small business loan to someone whos never had a business before but has a solid plan and resume with relevant skills vs the "idea guy".

Yeah, sadly I fear you may be right. I think the real problem is people thinking they SHOULD be a certain thing, and then get angry when they aren't the thing they expect themselves to be. If I don't write I get monumentally depressed, anxious, and constantly think of my work, my characters, narrative arcs, little bits of prose that I then note down on my phone. I simply can't not write and it baffles me when people say they want to but can't or won't. It's just a case of sitting down and doing it, and seeing if you're good or not.

I fully acknowledge there are exceptions. But that doesn't change the fact that most of the example of working artists mentioned ITT had privileged backgrounds.

A lot of this is the tremendous anxiety derived from the prospect of failure, stemming from delus

A lot of what? The inability to write is because of a fear of failure?

Exactly just sit and start. All these twitch streamers and Ecelebs you can make fun of them all you want for making a living playing video games and having an audience but they took the time to actually set this shit up and find whatever niche they have and make time for it. OP we may be telling you to stop feeling like a little bitch, but the real message were trying to say is just to write and write.

Ancedote, I remember volunteering at a hospital (premed major kill me I know) and this fat pasty bearded white guy in his late 20s was also volunteering their. We had a conversation and low and behold hes a writer but makes cringe 1000+ page LOTR rip off fantasy books.

Never got his name but last I heard of him he was getting published. If that cringe dude can do it so can you.

Yes. You conceive of yourself as a great artist, and have some kind of idea of what talented people are like (usually stemming from apocrypha, popular culture etc.) and become terrified of failing to meet those standards, rendering you immobile.

That's a fair observation. I won't continue to blog, but thank you for asking that question.

Ahh yes. That's why the key really is just to write for yourself. Write for its own sake. That's what op needs to do.

OP, take some vacation time, do not quit your job, go somewhere remote with no television and no computer, and pledge to write at least 3 hours a day and read at least 3 hours a day. Do that for a week or two. I guarantee after that you'll either have rediscovered your creative spark or you'll be sick of writing and realise it's not for you.

Every great writer is the exception, that’s why they are great. Chekhov was a working artist without a privileged background. His father was a former serf who worked as a grocer and went bankrupt. Chekhov paid for primary school and medical school through his own means and supported his family despite being a student and trying to write at the same time.

Thank you.

OP here. I have actually published a couple of things, and was shortlisted for a few prizes in my early 20s though all under pseudonyms. I even met the head of a small publishing company, but due in part to my mental instability at the time I made a poor impression on him by discussing suicide and inceldom with him (several years, I would add, before inceldom became a mainstream cultural issue) and he never responded to me follow-up email despite encouraging me to email him after we talked. I met him again, a year later, and said hello and he blanked me with a kind of worried and even somewhat disgusted (I sensed) look. If only I had been more mature, level-headed and professional about things, and had kept my mouth shut and my abnormalities to myself, I maybe would have had a good chance at making a connection in the "industry", but now I am back to square one, with the few things I've published to my name being either poorly written childlike pieces or plainly embarrassing works which would, if anybody cared to link the narrator to the writer, make people assume I was disturbed, untrustworthy and a repulsive individual (which again may be true).

OP here and I relate to this. Reflecting on my life, I see a mediocre guy who never made it to an Ivy League college, never had the social confidence to network and live an interesting life, and instead burrowed inward and hid from the world. Writing about other people at this point feels sinister and insincere considering that I've spent most of my 20s as a depressed hermit earning little money in a job I loathed before suddenly receiving a promotion in that same job and gaining material comfort but losing creative ambition in the process.

Yeah relax

The thing about literature is you can write it until you die, there’s no age cut off. I’m a classical musician and there’s more of an age cut off to get established before you’re 35

Thanks for the responses and discussions so far, very much appreciate it.

Aren't most conductors in their 70s or something? Most orchestras I see are full of older folk.

Many

Philip Glass was a taxi driver for 10 years while writing music

user, honestly, I don't think you should care. In my opinion it is laudable that, at least to a certain extent, you stayed true to yourself and kept writing. It's true that if you read biographies everybody seems to be on this path towards greatness with absolute faith in themselves, but I can assure you that out of each Joyce there's a million people who believed to be him, made the same (honestly poor) life choices, and wrote nothing which is worth as much as Ulysses. And it's not like artists didn't work at all, except for a selected few. The most common way is to shit jobs and half-ass everything that isn't art: but it doesn't work for most people. There is no shame in wanting to have a comfortable lifestyle, if you think it suits you, as long as you don't hurt other people. And if you kept writing alongside doing this: good for you. I hope you wrote a good thing and that it gets published. But don't be embarassed about the jobs you did. Limonov was sucking black dick for a living at a certain point, it can't be worse than that

Were you in uchicago? I think we met

Those "artists" are trust fund kids, if you aren't in that class get used to wage slaving. It sucks, but not all of us are blessed with rich parents

my living costs are roughly 15k a year in a major american city. i can stash over 50% of my income in the bank while still living lavishly (for me.) and that's on a shitty job--within a few years i hope to be earning much more than this while keeping cost of living the same. i don't talk to or interact with normalfaggots so lifestyle creep won't affect me. i prefer simple, homecooked food rather than eating out. i hope to, first, liberate myself from student loan debt and, second, build up a portfolio that the proceed from which will be sufficient for me to gtfo of this overpriced shithole country and move somewhere i can live on more like 8-12k/year and live well. once i no longer have to work i can write every day.

unfortunately i keep getting medical issues that screw this plan up. best to eat a bullet i guess.

Look after your health brother.

I hope you'll be alright, good luck

How do you live on 15k a year? Do you live with your parents?

i live in a shithole crackhouse in a suite the size of a closet, no car, buy everything secondhand and pirate the rest, cook my own food, buy groceries at cheap shithole grocery stores, etc. i would sacrifice all material comfort for the sake of being able to jump ship from the corporate soul-sucking world and go live in a shack in eastern europe writing and eating bread and cabbage every day.

currently i read and write as much as possible but i can't hit those "intense" sessions the way i could when i was unemployed.

an alternative is to only work part time, but for that you still need to be in a first world cunt and i can't take advantage of exchange rates in a poverty shithole, but it could work if you have a portfolio's interest snowballing on the side.

thank you. it just sucks that every time i turn around i get medical issues that sap all my hard saved cash. born with a sickly body.

what medical issues burdne you?

a variety of small ones. basically i'm just weak and susceptible to illness, infection, etc. nothing major like cancer at least.

The majority of famous classical composers were poor, uneducated, dysfunctional, sick, and religious.

If you read their life story their whole lives were an ill grind

In the classical music world you generally need to have at least completed a masters degree and have won a competition before 35 if you want to become a notable solo performer

There are exceptions to this but not many