How the Interviewer Pays the Bills While He Writes the Book
“I work nights as a paramedic, days as a writer. The job brings me into thousands of apartments most people never see.”
Over the past five months, I interviewed a dozen writers about the day jobs they worked during the early years of their writing. Here’s my own Day Job story: I work nights as a paramedic in order to spend my days as a writer.
The shifts run eight hours. I stack a double shift and a single over two consecutive nights, and I’ve qualified for health insurance, a luxury unimaginable to every one of my artist friends.
Nineteen years of overnights, and I’m still grateful for the job. Not just for the security and flexibility, but because the anonymity and demands of the job bring me into the thousands of apartments most people walk by every day and never see.
As paramedics, we bring amazing diagnostic technology bedside — almost every wire and tube you’d receive in your first 10 minutes in the ER. But, often frustratingly for our patients, the most reliable indicator of what’s going on is provided by the patient’s story. We can often learn more from a patient’s description of their condition than we can from any machine. As clinicians, we ask: What’s different about tonight…
