How Working the Swing Shift Saved My Writing

In 2013, I got my first job in the news industry working for a national paper. There were so many things that were unfamiliar to me: the breath-stealing pressure of a daily deadline, the stress of having everyone on the desk looking over your shoulder as you wrote a headline with only a few minutes until the page had to be sent to transmission, new language like “flare,” like “lede,” like “treats,” like “jewel” and “zipper” and “deck.” But the newest thing, the oddest shift, was moving my life from the light to the dark.

Those of us in the news industry often work what’s called the second shift: it’s not the typical 9 to 5, and it’s not an overnight or a graveyard. Instead, it’s a slice of work that fills the gap between the two, 1 to 9, or 2 to 10, or 5 to 1. It’s also called the middle shift or the swing shift, mainly because it’s a time that swings, in motion and pendulous and defying precise definition, between the two more recognized workdays. 

Working this shift changes your life by shifting you forward, at first in a way that feels like a lurch and then in a way that feels like a big loping step. Daylight saving time never makes you distressed because, no matter what, it’s always dark when you leave work and always light when you wake up midmorning the next day. You end up learning the contours of your neighborhood without the help of sun; instead, you see each of your neighbors’ lives lit up at night in their apartment windows like stars in the sky. On the nighttime walk home, you swathe yourself in the dark like a security blanket, and you learn to be less scared of it. You don’t commute during rush hour; instead, it’s hush hour, the subway rocking like a lullaby punctuated by the occasional burble of a drunken reveler or a sleepy child.

Working nights also changes your life by limiting you. I find dating hard to schedule; people rarely want to meet at 11 pm on a weeknight, and lunch dates seem to be unanimously deemed uncool. My social life is locked in sometimes months in advance; because I only get two evenings off each week, they book up quickly, and there’s little wiggle room. I’ve lost friendships; I’ve stayed single for years. My sleep has never been quite as good as it was when I was working a 9 to 5, because it’s difficult to get the brain to quickly calm down, to climb into bed and try to wake up at a reasonable time. And it can be really hard when you get home from work and it’s quiet and lonely and you feel like you’re the only person awake in the thick, velvet night.

The allure of swing shift isn’t solely about having uninterrupted time. It’s also about using darkness as a shield, using unconventionality as a bolster.

But there’s at least one thing I think the swing shift is really, really good for, and that’s writing.

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I didn’t actually write my entire book while working nights. Some of it was started earlier, patched together throughout the final year of my writing degree, and then in between jobs as a bartender at a theatre, a volunteer at a literary magazine, and a barista for an office-building coffee counter. But it was once I settled into my job as a newspaper paginator and editor that I felt a shift. Something in me was cracked open, threatening to spill out onto whatever page was closest: my Notes app, an empty page in Google Drive, the notebook I was using for training at work. Suddenly, I had mornings spread out in front of me, open and free and strange. Suddenly, I had time during which other people weren’t around, during which things weren’t expected of me. If people didn’t want to meet for a date at noon, I could spend the whole morning researching. Since most of my friends worked a day shift, I didn’t have to uphold plans I had made, didn’t have anyone to distract me.

But the allure of swing shift isn’t solely about having uninterrupted time. It’s also about using darkness as a shield, using unconventionality as a bolster. When I commute with fewer people, when I walk to my apartment with no one crowding the sidewalk, when I’m able to go straight home after work instead of having to go to a class, a book launch, an acquaintance’s birthday dinner, my brain has the latitude to unfold. Without outward conversation using up my energy, I’m able to keep my inner conversations stoked.

And so I wrote. From 2013 to 2016, I finally, slowly sewed together the disparate essays that I believed could become a book. I thought about my book in the shower, on the subway, during my nighttime walks home. It grew out of the silence of coming home from work and feeling like I was the only person awake in the quiet of the night. I mustered the guts to approach an agent in the summer of 2016, and by February 2017, I was signing a deal with a publisher. Over the next two years, I used those precious unhindered mornings to go through three rounds of substantive edits, a copy edit, a proofread, and a lawyer’s edit, and, in May 2019, I was holding my new book in my hands.

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I won’t work the swing shift forever. I’m tired; my brain is ragged from writing all morning and then reading and editing all night. I tell people that my inner thesaurus is broken because, after a long week, I struggle to come up with the right word in conversations: “story” becomes “episode,” “football” becomes “baseball,” my boss becomes “mom.” Sometimes I say words incorrectly, mashing two nouns together to create a hideous new portmanteau. Sometimes I call a coworker the wrong name and don’t notice until someone else laughs. My head is a cage for too many words, too many thoughts about the power and different usages of language. It’s difficult to toggle back and forth between my adjective-rich personal writing and the clipped newsroom-ese of my work. It’s difficult to have an idea for a story and not be able to even make notes for it because newsroom deadlines are always looming and we’re all just trying to write the best headlines we can in the little time we have.

Now that I have a book published, people ask me if I’m going to quit my job in order to write full time. I tell them that there’s no way I could support myself on the proceeds from just one non-fiction book, that I’m not disciplined enough for the freelance hustle. But the truth is, the metronomic night-in and night-out of my work, the solidity of it, the familiar quiet and weight of the night that inexorably blooms into a bright, free morning, the beginning of a new shift with a new deadline and new ideas and new layouts—it’s a buttress for me. It’s a safety net, a necessary thing that pulls me out of my apartment even on the worst writing days, when I’m living heavily in my head, pinned between my characters. It’s the thing that keeps me in motion; I am pendulous, defying precise definition, swinging back and forth between day and night, writing and editing, the different forms of the language that defines my life.