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I work to pay the mortgage as a technical writer in software/aerospace/aviation/manufacturing, and am often faced with nothing to do for hours or even days at a time, then suddenly it's all hands on deck to get a project completed. To make the downtime go by, I work on one of my novels. I wrote a good portion of the first draft of my first novel at work. I turn the monitor so it's not visible from the doorway, or have two documents open, and clack away. I look very busy. One time, at a gig where I couldn't turn the monitor, I had one line of a manuscript visible and my manager stopped by. "Hey," he said, "you're writing for us and we don't have any requirements for that."
If you were to become a successful author your employer or former employers might be entitled to all or a portion of the rights to your writing that you did on their dime.
easy enough to solve - just don't become successful and no one will ever care.
If you were to become a successful author your employer or former employers might be entitled to all or a portion of the rights to your writing that you did on their dime.
This is only true in if the work was prepared for the employer as defined by one's work contract.
Example:
When I worked in IT for a well-known corporation, I produced a lot of technical documentation on such scintillating topics as global WANs, batch job flow, HP 9000s, etc. Since such work was within the scope of my employment, I never owned any of that technical writing. I also wrote most of a novel at that job. Since that writing wasn't within the defined scope of my employment, my employer never had any legal claim whatsoever to it.
I've seen this assertion put forth by writers numerous times - "Don't write your novel at work because you're employer will own it!" - but in 99.9% of cases such a claim has no basis in the law.
This is only true in if the work was prepared for the employer as defined by one's work contract.
Example:
When I worked in IT for a well-known corporation, I produced a lot of technical documentation on such scintillating topics as global WANs, batch job flow, HP 9000s, etc. Since such work was within the scope of my employment, I never owned any of that technical writing. I also wrote most of a novel at that job. Since that writing wasn't within the defined scope of my employment, my employer never had any legal claim whatsoever to it.
I've seen this assertion put forth by writers numerous times - "Don't write your novel at work because you're employer will own it!" - but in 99.9% of cases such a claim has no basis in the law.
I agree. It's also doubtful that the employer would find out that you wrote the novel while on the job, unless you went around telling people.
Although I would not put it past an empioyer to at least try to get some of the money. They would likely try.
Last edited by PriscillaVanilla; 03-08-2020 at 10:08 AM..
There's no way I could do that. Too many balls in the air.
However, at a recent workshop, I met a guy who was the third-shift security guard at a chicken processing plant. His job was to sit at a desk out in the middle of nowhere, watch the security cameras, and walk the plant every couple of hours.
Because it was a third-shift job, there was no one to talk to. So he could bang out a couple of thousand words a night of his sci-fi novel. I have no idea whether or not it was good. But I found myself envying the guy for the vast amount of free time he enjoyed.
To be a writer, you have to be more than a thief of life. You have to be a thief of time as well. However, unless I had a job where my sole duty was to occupy space and breathe, I wouldn't feel right writing on the job.
Seems like the biggest concerns for those who disapprove are either the potential ownership of rights over the finished product, or the concept of stolen time.
For the ownership problem, several other responses have already addressed this. Unless the work was under contract or in some rare cases encompassed the scope of the job (writing about your job on the job) then there is no way your employer is going to own your novel. Fortunately most employers are smart enough to know this. The ones who aren't and try to bang out a lawsuit for compensation, will learn this the hard way.
For the stolen time issue, I never have and never will have that kind of sacrificial loyalty to a work place. I now only apply to and work for jobs that pay me to do a job, not fill hours. I don't work on my novel until my job for the day is done. If my job is done, then I have earned my pay. The rest of my time I sit in my office and tap away on the keyboard.
I long ago stopped working for jobs that cared about me filling every hour of the working day with productivity. I care too much for my health and welfare for that.
As of now I've started into book 4 of my 5 book series. Still haven't submitted the first yet. I feel I need to be able to alter parts of it if there is a plot thread or issue in my later books that demand I go back to that first part and set up the incident correctly.
I agree. It's also doubtful that the employer would find out that you wrote the novel while on the job, unless you went around telling people.
Although I would not put it past an empioyer to at least try to get some of the money. They would likely try.
I never hid that I wrote at the job. No one cared. I'm pretty sure corporate legal has better things to do - even if I became a bestselling author. ()
Really, it was the nature of the job. My department had a television, cable, and a DVD player. Not in the breakroom (well, there, too) but right in our workstation itself. My job was to deal with problems. But most of the time there weren't any problems. I had a few monthly projects which filled some of the downtime, but having systems down was so costly to my employer understood that it was much cheaper to employ extra bodies who would spend maybe half their time having no tasks to perform than to employ fewer people but to then run in to times when there weren't enough bodies to deal with the problems, which would mean prolonged outages. For a Fortune 500 company, systems outages in the IT department become very costly very quickly.
So as long as we were dealing with outages and doing our regular projects, what we did in the rest of our time didn't matter. I mean, every director who ever walked through could see the television and the DVD player. They knew the deal. I had a coworker to played online video games. Another worked on her weekly Bible study teaching course. Mostly, they just surfed the internet. (I did a lot of that, too - after 10 hours of a 12-hour shift, my mind was usually too fried to write)
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