Some of us have to work for a living

A lot of people who have read my column might be wondering: What qualifies me to be a writer? I recall one e-mail sender who gently suggested that being a columnist couldn’t possibly be my actual job – spewing out nonsense on a weekly basis. "What’s your real job?" asked this pesky e-mailer (whom I will not dignify by naming).

Well, in truth, writing is what I do, though it pays hardly anything at all. But once you explain this to people, the real trouble begins. Then you get the embarrassing nods, the downward-cast eyes, the there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I look of infinite pity. (Except in the Philippines where, for some odd reason, writers are respected.)

The answer to the above question – What qualifies me to be a writer? –is that I have held a bewildering variety of jobs over the years which, taken together, paint a convincing picture of someone uniquely qualified to do absolutely nothing in particular – hence, writing.

I’ve also noticed that many writers like to list odd jobs on their bios and book jackets, to make them seem really down-to-earth and idiosyncratic. Thus, for example, we learn that Truman Capote was a skilled tap dancer; William Burroughs was a bug exterminator; John Irving almost became a professional wrestler; and Ray Bradbury sold newspapers on the streets before turning to professional writing.

Sci-fi author Robert A. Heinlein was reportedly a miner and a real estate agent before penning Starship Troopers and Stranger in a Strange Land.

Kurt Vonnegut had an exciting career at General Electric before sitting down to write Slaughterhouse Five.

We also learn that novelist Graham Greene worked for a time with the British-American Tobacco Company and with Asiatic Petroleum. Clearly, the corporate world was not for him in the end.

Kafka was said to be a clerk in a Prague law office, an occupation which must have confirmed his view of man as a verminous insect. Best-selling author John Grisham was a lawyer before finding out where the real money was.

Sometimes odd jobs provide ample material for a writer. We read that Hemingway was an ambulance driver during the First World War, while Herman Melville served as a cabin boy on a merchant ship long before penning Billy Budd and Moby Dick. George Orwell did a stint as an imperial cop in Burma, an experience that indelibly shaped his world view.

Hard labor has been grist for many a 20th-century American writer. It has been noted that John Steinbeck once worked as a fruit picker, and that Mark Twain (real name: Samuel Clemens) worked as a riverboat man on the Mississippi until the repeated command to measure water depth ("mark twain") gave birth to his pen name.

Itinerancy, wanderlust, perambulation: the inability to stay in one place has resulted in a species of writer whose résumé is often longer than his or her literary output. We learn that author Peter Hoeg was (and I quote his book blurb) "a dancer, actor, fencer, sailor, mountaineer" in addition to producing Smilla’s Sense of Snow. Michel Faber worked as "a nurse, a pickle-packer, a cleaner, and a guinea pig for medical research" before becoming a writer. The magpie novelist, jumping from job to job (the more blue-collar the better), is something of a literary standby by now. Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk claims his pre-literary experience was rebuilding truck engines, which is certainly less intimidating and possibly more useful than writing novels.

So, in the interest of proving once and for all that I’m a writer, I’ve decided to list some of the many oh-so-interesting jobs I’ve held over the years, for however brief a time, in no particular order:

I’ve been an apple-picker, a burger-flipper, a painter of roller coasters; a transcriber, a Closed Captioner of Programming for the Hearing-Impaired;

An amateur draftsman, a freelance illustrator;

A telemarketer (for exactly one day), a hotel desk clerk, a copy-editor;

An assembly-line worker, an office temp, an all-night gas station attendant, a seller of my own blood (on one occasion);

A movie extra (for the Hal Ashby film, The Slugger’s Wife – believe me, you haven’t seen it), a children’s museum guide, a newspaper "stringer";

A landscaper, a groundsman, a ditch-digger;

A youth counselor, an adult counselor at a mental hospital;

An Italian-sandwich maker, a restaurateur, a contributor to magazines;

A reader of news for the blind, a college radio disc jockey;

A babysitter, a housesitter, a seasonal UPS worker, a convenience store employee;

An author, an editor, a deskman; a newspaper columnist, a music reviewer, a book reviewer.

That pretty much brings us up to date. As you can see from my résumé, this has been a life spent trying on many different, mostly odd and temporary roles. There is, upon inspection, a thin thread of jobs related to publishing and writing – the indirect result of possessing a BA in English. But nothing that clearly points, in large, indelible letters, to W-R-I-T-E-R. So again, the question arises: What entitles me to be a writer?

When you come right down to it? It sure beats working.

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Look for The X-Pat Files and Kano-nization: More Secrets From The X-Pat Files, available at National, Goodwill and other bookstores