The Purple Mango Post

Zora Neale Hurston.

"So, are you . . . working?"

In the three years I've been a full-time freelance writer, I have been asked that question more times than I can count by friends and former colleagues trying to figure out what I do with myself. Their confusion is understandable. For while I do go to an office each day, drink coffee, and collect paychecks, I haven't had much evidence to show of actual "work." Unlike newspapers, whose editors wake up each day in a cold sweat hungry for content to fill that day's pages, the Web- and print-based clients I've been writing for these last few years do not share that sense of desperation. Stories get held, sometimes for close to a year. My work for The Biography Channel is rolling out slowly over months. A project at The History Channel may never see the light of day. And in this long period before it is actually published, the book I'm writing essentially functions as an imaginary friend.

And then, just when I've forgotten that I am technically a tax-paying professional, Shmoop Biography goes live!

I spent a year and a half writing the content for this section of the fun, funky, award-winning educational site Shmoop.com. It is easier to list the biographies I didn't write than the ones I did (the presidents, William Faulkner and Albert Einstein). They are full of quirky facts about famous creative types, many of whom were remarkably strange people (Lewis Carroll was a math genius with an unsettling fondness for photographing little girls; Mary Shelley kept the crumbling remains of Percy's heart in her desk drawer for years after his death; Tennessee Williams's daily pill regimen would have killed a horse.)

Spending your days immersed in the lives of famous writers makes for sometimes morbid perspective ("Keats died at 26? Perfect. I'll get to him after Lord Byron") but is also comforting. For while we remember them decades later for their masterpieces, the truth is that even the geniuses spent years in quotidian day jobs that don't show up in their Nobel biographies. Robert Frost taught elementary school while working on his first collection. For the duration of his poetry career, T.S. Eliot worked an accounts manager at Lloyds Bank and then as an editor at a publishing house. George Orwell was a bookshop clerk (and, like a good hourly employee, came to despise his customers intensely). Zora Neale Hurston worked as a maid, a librarian and a substitute teacher - and that was after she published Their Eyes Were Watching God. All jobs are good that allow you to do work that matters to you, even if that means simply offering financial support while you pursue a creative life after-hours. And if the work itself turns out to be fun - and eventually gets published? Bonus.