Attend any writer’s panel, conference, workshop, or class; read or listen to any interview, and you’ll hear the question: How do you make time to write? In a world with working(!), sleeping(!), family obligations(!), housework(!), health-sustaining activity(!), various relationships(!) and, heaven-forbid, other interests(!!), how do you make time to write?

My current answer is not to make all that much time. I do what I call the half Terry Pratchett and aim for a minimum of 200 words of writing a day, which really only takes about 15 minutes if I feel very hot. And I skip it for sensible reasons, like having a migraine. I write longer if I feel like it, and if it doesn’t encroach on my other obligations.

Can you really get anything done with only 200 words a day? An average of 200 words a day comes out to 73,000 words a year, literally an entire novel. An entire novel draft every year with a daily practice of 15-30 minutes. I’ve checked this on a calculator several times, because I can’t even intuitively bring myself to believe this. I came to this practice almost by accident, reading about other relative amateurs aiming to do practice in relation to Terry Pratchett’s notorious 400 words per day. This is not the professional advice I received by basically anyone in my writing education, formal or informal. Instead, I received advice ranging from self-flagellating to morally squicky:

• Wake up at some god-awful time and punish yourself with some number of hours of writing before work.
• Think hard about whether you want to write. If you want to write, you better give up on all your other various interests, and live like a nun for writing. There’s no room in writing for someone who goes to parties, plays video games, or too often frequents the gym.
• Marry rich and mooch off your spouse.
• Be as lazy as you can get away with at your job, or get a non-cognitive job, to save up your brain juice for writing.
• Put off everything you can to make room for writing. Do you really need to do the dishes?

It’s easy to eat a lie, when you’re writing, that nothing else really matters. It’s easy to say that anyone who wants you to prioritize some other task in your life just doesn’t understand you and your vocation. It’s easy to say the dishes, that you don’t want to do, actually don’t have to get done—because it’s not as important as writing. Over the past few years, I have been on a slow turn of thought, deconstructing this idea, and coming around to the fact that yes, actually, you do need to do the dishes.

One of the great disillusionments of my grad school experience was realizing that most people in the Ivory Tower have very poisoned and self-serving motivations. I went very enthusiastic to write, to critique writing, to teach writing, and to edit writing. Truly, I have met some teachers and mentors who were good, who were invested in the well-being of students, and deserved their positions, I promise. Also, I was shocked (naively) to discover that universities are also perfectly cultivated and protective environments for tenured professors who are intrinsically nonfunctional human beings, people who would break down, wither, or simply pass away if they had to hold down a regular job like most of the rest of us do.

The sheer levels of public substance abuse alone could only be called “functional” alcoholism because a tenured university job requires very little in the way of actual functionality. I remember once drinking at a bar with a professor in his 50’s or so in another department who left his backpack there. The next morning, when I let him know, he asked me what bar it had been at, because he couldn’t remember where he had drank that night. One colleague had to run out of his classroom, while teaching, to vomit due to a hangover.

Adjunct and non-tenured professors, who usually teach the backbone courses of a university for shockingly paltry sums, have legitimate grievances about workload and treatment as it relates to their pay. That does not stop tenured professors, sometimes with light workloads, from complaining about the things they are seemingly so inhumanely made to do. One of my professors was quite irked about her workload of teaching two whole classes each semester and having to do some light administrative work, for a salary I would assume is in the low, multiple six figures. For those of us who were irked about teaching one or two classes each semester for about ten thousand dollars, she suggested we just phone it in a little harder, which made me question her own investment in teaching me.

To be clear, I think we should be tenuring more professors. Contracting teachers in large masses for little money is greedy to the point of petty evil. But a lot of tenured professors, especially those who have gotten to avoid true participation in the contemporary economy, refuse to acknowledge how good they have it. I certainly did not want to hear about how much working part-time for an upper-middle-class salary is an affront to the creative dream of just doing nothing outside your own head all day. Especially not when, right before grad school, I was working 45-50 hours a week as a closer at Starbucks for $8.05 per hour, supplemented by the occasional copyediting gig for a luxurious $10 per hour.

The seductive part of the false narrative that everything should come second to creative pursuits is we can tell ourselves we are special. There is something in us so worth protecting and nurturing, that it exempts us from the daily struggles of the average peasant.

In my experience, however, I haven’t met a great deal of very focused writers who don’t express this in ways that are other-destructive. It has not been my experience that many intent writers live modestly, work part-time, and either live single or choose partners who share these values and aren’t subsidizing these choices. I see many creative types living with their parents much longer than their peers, couch surfing with friends, or being substantially subsidized by their spouses. I see them often struggling to hold jobs for very long. And I see them struggling not to spend money they don’t have.

Of course, people can choose to share the burden of this life. A spouse can believe in their partner’s work and choose to take a little extra, for a little while, to support their dreams. But I sense, in the stories of this, a kind of survivor’s bias. How much money does the average writer (especially the creative kind) really make, if any at all? How many earn as much as they would in any other kind of job?

One of the rude facts of life is some things need to get done. The rent or mortgage costs an amount that must regularly be paid. An employer tells you what to do, and expects you to do it. Food must be prepared and eaten. And the dishes (the dishes!) must be done no later than the moment there are no more dishes. A spouse (if you have one) will want to do things with you. As will the children (if you have them). Overall, it is mostly not fair, mostly not just. But it is. And it must be reconciled with in some way, with some honesty.

A household requires a bare minimum amount of maintenance, which everyone in the household should contribute to. It’s really that simple and that difficult. For me, 200 words of writing is something I can slot into a life in which everything else gets done.

And if you do get your life of the mind? What could you even say to anyone else? What proletarian turning the wheels of the working class life, and being turned, wants to hear what someone living the life of a sustaining trust fund has to say?

What could you contribute to this world, creatively, if you never do the daily work, paid and domestically, everyone else has to do? That kind of being special has nothing to do with what the world needs.