Danica Li’s eyebags are the size of craters after working as a litigator for the last eight years, but at least she’s gotten some good stories out of it.

READ DANICA LI’S SHORT STORY “MY BROTHER WILLIAM” IN THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES 2023!

Moonlighting Jobs

I was a lawyer for the last eight years. I’ve seen and dealt with some truly heinous shit in this job, and seen and heard some things that would make most peoples’ ears turn black and fall off.

What were some of your biggest challenges along your writing/publishing path?

Crippling self-doubt, fear of failure, and a tendency towards procrastinatory avoidance—a typical trifecta of neuroses, probably. There’ve been years where I didn’t write because I avoided it—I didn’t want to try and fail at this thing I loved so much. Then, even when I’d gotten myself back into writing, there were years when I avoided submitting my work because I was terrified of rejection. Even now that I’ve gotten a few pieces published and received some recognition for my writing, I find myself constantly having to negotiate with my panic-self before I can start my work. It’s just constant mental jiujitsu between myself and my fear.

The fear’s gotten more impersonal, though. I understand that ultimately, my fear’s trying to keep me safe. It serves a function. It’s a built-in self-protection mechanism. I’m not always successful, but I’ve improved at working with it and through it. I can more easily sense now when to back off and call it a day, when to press through, and what things I can do to talk it down when it’s particularly flared. It’s an on-going, daily negotiation.

Ultimately, I’ve found that overcoming my fear depends on building a loving, attuned relationship with my creative process, and also with my body, which is where my creative process lives.

What advice would you give to writers/artists today who are "moonlighting" in order to support their art?

For creatives, there’s nothing more important than sitting down and doing the work. If you’re trying to write a novel, make a film, record an album, or create any sizable project, then you will likely have to dedicate hundreds of hours to the creation of the work, probably over many years. Of course, there are a million things in life that are always eroding away at that time, most prominently the jobs we all have to work to pay rent. My advice is to create strong boundaries around your creative time. Reserve regular blocks of time in your day or week or month and then say no to things that would impinge on the time. No to doomscrolling the apps, binge-watching TV, shitty relationships, everything. Cut out every single bit of bullshit from your life. Be strict about it. Do what’s necessary to protect your energy and your windows of workspace.

The intensity of the work is hilarious, absurd, and at times a little frightening. For example, last year I did a series of mediations trying to resolve a multi-million dollar case which entailed staying up until 1 a.m. over multiple nights screaming and spouting threats. I’ve filed charges for organizers who’ve had SUVs driven at them during rallies by deranged counter-protestors. I’ve convinced frightened women to give testimony in sensitive MeToo cases, and taken affidavits at midnight from graveyard-shift hospital workers in the midst of a statewide hospital strike. One time—and this is only somewhat of an exaggeration—a judge locked me and a client in a windowless mediation room and kept us there until midnight without food or drink, in an attempt to starve us into settling a case.

I’ve thought a lot about the trade-off I made during that period. It’s true that the job obliterated the concept of work-life balance from my life, and made it difficult to have the time or energy to do my writing, but it was also true that in my position I had a vantage point on some incredible material—the primal human drama of the cases, the powerful forces and rifts undergirding the organization of our society. I came to see, too, the way that power is distributed in the institutions that run society, the machinations and stratagems common to power struggle, and the incredible rewards and heartbreaking costs of that struggle. In short, the job paid for my rent, my insurance, and my costs of living, sure, but it also helped me understand some foundational things about the world we live in. And naturally, all of it has played into my writing too.

Danica Li is a union lawyer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her writing has been published in the Missouri Review, the Iowa Review, and the California Law Review, has appeared in Best American Short Stories 2023, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. She obtained her law degree from the University of California, Berkeley, where she was also awarded the Eisner Prize in Prose, the university's highest writing award, as an undergraduate. The first writing prize she ever won was for a short story about unicorns in the fourth grade.

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