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You're listening to Away with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I'm Grant Barrett.

And I'm Martha Barnett. If you're a writer

or want to be one, then you know the pain of trying to arrange those words in just the right way.

And you also know the joy of hitting that sweet spot when you succeed. But what if in order to

pay the bills, you have to spend a lot of time writing in another genre.

Maybe you're a novelist who has to write web copy by day or a poet who has to work as a grant writer.

Take Michael Errard. He's a journalist and essayist.

But for his day job, he has to write reports for a think tank.

And he describes the tradeoff this way.

He says, I'm a dancer who walks for a living. Oh, nice. Isn't that great? So here's a question, Grant. If you're a writer who has to

compromise that way to make ends meet, how do you keep your creative work from being polluted?

What a struggle that must be, right? Well, I had it. I ran into this back when I was

trying to support my etymological habit. I was writing for a beauty magazine by day. I was pouring

all my energy into stories like how to get the perfect butt. And then by night, I'd be trying

to write gracefully about ancient Greek. And it wasn't easy. It was really hard to make that transition between the two

because you get a rhythm going. Did you do something to clear your mind? Was there something like a walk

or even something simple like that? Well, certainly walks and that kind of thing. But in terms of

language, you know what? Often I would just copy the kind of writing that I wanted to emulate. I mean,

literally, almost like an art student, painting an old master. I would read other writers aloud. I would

...