On this repost Saturday I’m going to actually do a mash-up of two posts I wrote years ago. This was inspired after I visited the first boyhood home of Tennessee Williams in Columbus, Mississippi earlier this week and learned that when he was in his early 20s his shoe salesman father had Tennessee drop out of college and work a 9 to 5 job at the International Shoe Company factory in St. Louis. (The city used to be known for its “shoes, booze, and blues.”)
Tennessee hated the routine so much that it pushed him to write one story a week, writing at night and on weekends.
“Tom would go to his room with black coffee and cigarettes and I would hear the typewriter clicking away at night in the silent house. Some mornings when I walked in to wake him for work, I would find him sprawled fully dressed across the bed, too tired to remove his clothes.”
Edwina Williams (mother of Tennessee Williams who she called by his given name Tom)
Of course, I should mention that while working at the shoe factory drove him to write it was also said to drive him toward a nervous breakdown. But I doubt you can really blame his day job for his depression—or the drug and alcohol addiction that he battled for decades until he died—because those things for whatever reason seem to be pretty common traits in writers (and many artists in general) through the ages. One could even argue the greater the demons, the greater the writing. (Link to Top 15 Great Alcoholic Writers.)
But that’s another post for another day. It is worth pointing out that that day job Williams hated helped not only inspire him to write, but helped give him writing material.
Here’s my mash-up for the day. The first part is from the post Keeping Sane and Solvent (Part 3—Interview with Richard Walter, author of Essentials of Screenwriting);
SS: A while back I discovered that the Stanley Kowalski character from A Streetcar Named Desire was based on a person that Tennessee Williams had worked with in a factory. Over and over again I seem to discover more proof, that as you say, “the day job is the writer’s friend.”
Richard Walter: That’s a perfect example. Your day job keeps you in touch with the source of your writing which is the humanity around you. The writer’s dream is that you’re so self-sufficient you can just be in a cabin in the woods or a cottage at the beach—well, when I have too much time on my hand I’ll call for a ski report, even in August, just to avoid what I’m supposed to be working on.
Your day job is your friend. The writer’s day job is the friend of the writer. It keeps him solvent and sane, which are two closely related enterprises.
Screenwriter Nick Schenk based characters in his script Gran Torino on people he had worked with in various places in the Minneapolis area and had met in bars. Anyone else happen to notice that the Clint Eastwood character is also named Kowalski? Perhaps influenced by Tennessee Williams in more than one way.
And part two of the mash-up is from a 2010 post title Don’t Quit Your Day Job;
“I was a city health inspector in Boston. Do the necessary work to pay your bills and take care of your family, and you’ll get there. Talent has a way of workin’ itself out. Hollywood will find you. Eventually.”
Screenwriter James L. White (Ray)
Workin 9 to 5
What a way to make a livin’
Barely gettin by
It’s all takin’
And no givin’
9 to 5
Grammy-winning, number one song written by Dolly Parton
Before screenwriter Colin Higgins bought a house in Beverly Hills, he once had a job cleaning pools there. Higgins had a great run in the 70s & 80s writing Silver Streak, Foul Play, Nine to Five, and The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.
But in the book Tales from the Script, UCLA professor Richard Walter tells the story of how Higgins once hoped to win a Goldwyn screenwriting competition so he could quit his day job and write full-time for a year. He ended up getting second in the competition so he had to keep his day job which in turned launched his career. Here’s how Walter’s tell the story;
“(Colin Higgins) went to work for a swimming pool cleaning company. And the very first pool that he’s cleaning is in the flats in Beverly Hills–great big, fancy house. As he’s vacuuming the pool, sitting under a beach umbrella at the pool is a guy who clearly owns the house and he’s reading a screenplay. They get to chatting , and Colin tells him about this script that won the Goldwyn prize. And this producer agrees to read it, and ends up producing it. It’s Harold and Maude. So you just have to stay open to the surprises.”
Now keep in mind that when Higgins was cleaning pools he had already served in the United States Merchant Marines, had an English degree from Stanford and an MFA in screenwriting from UCLA. In fact, he wrote Harold and Maude as his thesis. So don’t think he was just a pool guy who BS’ed his way into a screenwriting career. But once again, another story to add to my “bump-in factor” file.
And, now back to November 9, 2013, here’s a related bonus video from The Ellen Show a couple of days ago :
“Go work until you can get the kind of job you want to have.”
Ashton Kutcher
Update 11/10/13: Found this Paris Review interview where Williams talks about life before the success of The Glass Menagerie:
“Before the success of Menagerie I’d reached the very, very bottom. I would have died without the money. I couldn’t have gone on any further, baby, without money, when suddenly, providentially, The Glass Menagerie made it when I was thirty-four. I couldn’t have gone on with these hand-to-mouth jobs, these jobs for which I had no aptitude, like waiting on tables, running elevators, and even being a teletype operator. None of this stuff was anything I could have held for long. I started writing at twelve, as I said. By the time I was in my late teens I was writing every day, I guess, even after I was in the shoe business for three years. I wrecked my health, what there was of it. I drank black coffee so much, so I could stay up nearly all night and write, that it exhausted me physically and nervously. So if I suddenly hadn’t had this dispensation from Providence with Menagerie, I couldn’t have made it for another year, I don’t think.”
Tennessee Williams
Related post:
Screenwriter’s Work Ethic (Tip #2)
Screenwriting Quote #10 (Nick Schenk)
Emotional Autobiography Includes the quote from Art & Fear, “Tennessee Williams observed, even works of demonstrable fiction or fantasy remain emotionally autobiographical.”
Why You Should Move to L.A.
Why You Shouldn’t Move to L.A.
Writers: Don’t Skip Jury Duty
Where Do Ideas Come From? (A+B=C)
What’s it Like Being a Struggling Writer in L.A.?
