What’s the difference between me and a stand-up comedian? Obviously, the comedian is funny, and I’m not. But that hasn’t stopped me from being a little bit inspired by an article I read in this morning’s West about Wil Anderson, an Aussie stand-up who became famous to me when he worked on Triple J radio as the breakfast announcer.

The bit that inspired me was how he decided to give up all semblance of a “good job” and try being a stand-up comedian full-time. Actually, he got the advice from further afield too, so let me just reproduce it here quickly:

… I was still working part-time and I was watching Oprah, as you do, and she had Roseanne Barr on … and Oprah said, ‘Did you have something to fall back on when you started doing comedy?’ and Roseanne said something that really resonated with me. She said, ‘No, because if you have something to fall back on, you will fall back on it.’

Now obviously (well it’s obvious to me, anyway) I’m not in a position where I can just give up all other work and focus on being a novelist. Among other problems, the bank would certainly have something to say about that if our mortgage payments disappeared for a while. I also think that being a full-time novelist would probably send me in the direction of a mental hospital quite quickly, because I need a fair degree of human contact to stay relatively sane.

BUT, I really like the idea of not having something to fall back on. And perhaps one day in the far distant future I’ll be able to approach writing in such a way. Presumably Roseanne Barr and Wil Anderson did this when they were young and single (I don’t know, but it certainly seems more practical then). Here I am, re-enrolling at uni to finish my MEd to have something to fall back on (yes, these are the exact words I used in making this decision), when I could be jumping in to creative writing study, or something. I justify this to myself by saying that I really do want to continue a few parallel paths – teaching and writing seem to complement each other so well for me, the social and the withdrawn, the interactive and the personal. I think I’m right, for me, but I sure as hell admire people who can just jump right in to a risky, creative career without a safety net.