Jenna Clake on Learning the Craft of Fiction By Working In a Call Center

There are many novels about the routine of work, including Halle Butler’s The New Me, Kikuko Tsumura’s There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job, and Emi Yagi’s Diary of a Void. In all three novels, their protagonists – young women – are burned out. Like the women in these novels, the narrator of my own novel, Disturbance, uses office work as an emotional void to escape the pressures of her personal life.

In my early twenties, I worked at an energy supplier, answering phone calls and emails all day. It was exhausting, high-pressure work, which typically resulted in being shouted at – by customer, or team leader (for not taking enough calls). But the office job had one key benefit: work ended when I left. I was studying for my MA in Creative Writing at the same time, so used my thirty-minute lunch breaks, the commute there and back, and weekend mornings to read and write my assignments. Having sat a desk all week, I found the best place to write: lying down.

In this piece, I show how fitting my writing around my work taught me the routines I needed when I came to write my debut novel: short, sharp bursts of writing; ‘leaving’ when things are going well; feeling as relaxed as possible – getting away from the idea of ‘work’, and moving towards ‘play’.