The Strange Joy of Having a Portfolio Career

This week I found myself making flower arrangements for a wedding. Now, before anyone gets excited, this is not a dramatic career pivot. I have absolutely no qualifications in floristry. There I was with secateurs in one hand and a bucket of flowers in the other. Somebody needed another pair of hands, I was there, and in creative work that's often how these things happen. It did make me laugh. Twenty years ago I don't think I'd have imagined that being a writer would occasionally involve trimming roses.

People ask me what I actually do quite a lot. It's a fair question, and I still don't have a tidy answer. I usually say I'm a writer because it's the easiest explanation, but it only tells part of the story. This week alone I've edited poems, worked on a novel, dealt with publishing admin, written some marketing copy, had meetings about events, chased emails, sorted publicity and helped decorate a wedding.

The writing sits underneath all of it. Everything else seems to grow out from there. I suspect that's true for a lot of creative people. We have this image of writers tucked away in beautiful studies overlooking lochs, producing novels while the kettle whistles quietly in the background. I honestly don't know anyone whose life looks like that. The writers I know teach, edit, freelance, run workshops, organise festivals, apply for funding and juggle several jobs while trying to carve out enough time to write.

People call it a portfolio career, although I still think that makes it sound much more polished than it really is. In reality, I’ll get back from school run, open my laptop thinking to work on Chapter Twelve and find that top of my to do is a press release before lunch. Then it’s half an hour looking for the latest version of a document because Past You thought FINAL FINAL DEFINITE was a sensible filename, all while knowing my freelance file nomenclature is immaculate. Some weeks I feel as though I'm playing calendar Tetris. I used to worry all those different jobs would get in the way of the writing. Now I'm not so sure. They seem to feed each other. My laptop closing check-in with my completed tasks & start the day lists are immaculate to keep on top of it all.

Running literary events has taught me not to panic when something changes at the last minute, because something always changes at the last minute. Publishing has shown me just how much invisible work goes into every finished book. Editing has made me much tougher with my own drafts. Marketing has forced me to think about readers differently. Even the flower arranging is useful. You're still thinking about balance, shape, pacing, where the eye lands first, I’m using my editing skill set. I collect experiences from all over the place, then sooner or later they find their way into the work. Very little gets wasted. Writing itself can be lonely. Some days that's exactly what I want. There are few better feelings than disappearing into a story for several hours and coming back out having finally cracked a difficult scene.

Other days I look up and realise I've barely spoken to another adult, other than my husband! That's where the rest of my working life comes in. The publishing, the festivals, the workshops, the literary projects, they remind me that books don't appear in isolation. They're made by communities. People reading one another's work, organising events, recommending writers, making introductions, lending a hand when something needs done.

I've written before about the Scottish literary scene feeling like a coral reef and I still think that's the closest I've come to describing it. None of us stays in one place for very long. We move between writing, editing, publishing, organising, volunteering and cheering each other on. Last week I was launching my own pamphlets. This week I was helping with flowers. Next week I'll probably be writing press releases, working on the novel and planning events.

One of the nicest surprises has been the people. When I was younger, I imagined writing as something you did almost entirely alone, and those of you who know me will all agree, I’m not the solitary sort. It’s one of the reasons it took me a while to get going. I’m a people person. The writing itself still is, of course, but the career around it certainly isn't. Some of the people I now count as close friends first appeared because we ended up working on the same literary project. Before you know it, you've spent months solving problems together, celebrating good news, talking each other through rejections and generally keeping one another going.

Of course, a portfolio career asks quite a lot of you as well. There are invoices, spreadsheets and far too many emails. There are weeks when everything seems urgent and the novel quietly waits until everyone else has gone to bed. Nobody tells you what to work on next. Nobody notices if you've quietly stopped writing for a fortnight because life has got in the way. You have to keep pulling yourself back to the page. That can be hard. It's also kind a kind of freedom.

No two weeks look quite the same. I'd be lying if I said I never dreamt of disappearing into a cabin for a month with nothing to think about except fiction. I'd swap a few spreadsheets for that without much hesitation. Then again, I'd miss the conversations, launches, publishing meetings where somebody gets excited about a new collection. I'd miss workshops where a writer suddenly finds the poem they've been looking for. I'd probably even miss the unexpected jobs, because they're often where the best stories begin. Maybe that's what I've slowly realised. From the outside, my working life probably looks a bit chaotic. From the inside, it makes a surprising amount of sense.

The writing is still at the heart of it. It always will be. Everything else circles around it, keeping me connected to readers, to writers and to the wider creative world. Somewhere along the way it's all become part of the same life. Even the flowers.