I recently came across Rod Serling’s introduction to his 1957 book ‘Patterns’ (h/t to the interesting piece The Enduring Legacy of The Twilight Zone by Brian Murray).

This article is a must-read for screenwriters, and a good read for anyone with creative pursuits.

Early in the piece, Serling discusses writing in the evening, after his day job (where he was a writer, but for bland copy):

“It’s axiomatic that the beginning free-lance writer must have some sort of economic base from which he operates. Usually it is a job with at least a subsistence wage to give him rent money and three square meals a day while he begins the treacherous and highly unsure first months of writing on his own. The most desirable situation encompasses an undemanding job that draws little out of the writer’s mind during the working day so that his nocturnal writing will be fresh, inspired and undiverted. In my case this was a wish but never a reality.

I used to come home at seven o’clock in the evening, gulp down a dinner and set up my antique portable typewriter on the kitchen table.”

It is always good when you pay the rent. This reminds me very much of Faulkner’s sentiments in his interview with The Paris Review, where he discusses the various day (or night) jobs that provided subsistence while allowing mental freedom.

Serling talks about his moment of giving in to his vocation, “succumbing” to becoming a writer. After a brief story, he explains (emphasis added):

“I was either going to write dramatic shows for television, even at the risk of economics and common sense, or I was going to succumb to the double-faced sanctimony of commercial radio, rotating words as if they were crops, and utilizing one of the approaches so characteristic to radio-writing and thinking downward at the lowest possible common denominator of an audience. That afternoon I quit the radio station.”

He doesn’t mince words here, and it is clear that his daytime work, while in the writing profession, was unsatisfying.

Later that night at a diner, comforted by the support of his wife whom he just told his new ambitions to, he felt at ease with the leap:

“All she did was to take my hand. Then she winked at me and picked up a menu and studied it. And at that given moment, the vision of medicine bottles, girl yodelers, and guitar-strumming M.C.s faded away into happy obscurity [these were things he had to write copy about]. For lush or lean, good or bad, Sardi’s or malnutrition, I’d launched a career.”