“WHAT will you do, now that you’ve retired?” is a question that I frequently have had to answer since I left my university post in October. I’ll do more of what I’ve always done: Write! After all, haven’t I divided my time between teaching and writing for at least 15 years? If you look at my past record, the two activities seemed to go side by side for two decades, along with travelling, reading and many other pursuits. But that doesn’t seem to suffice as an answer.

So let’s begin with the rather ominous word ‘retirement’. It’s no longer something you’re meant to do at 60. The leisurely pursuits of a retired existence — reading and other hobbies, travelling, and meeting friends — are associated, not with a writer’s life, but with holidays.

Most people who don’t write themselves imagine writing to be some miraculous activity — something the writer does in some dream moment, suspended in time, not during the working hours of the day. Tell a colleague that you’re in office or class, and they won’t dream of disturbing you in the morning. But dare to say you’re working on a story or a review, and your phone will be ringing, you’ll be enticed or even bribed to leave your desk for lunch, an exhibition or a walk, and your inboxes will fill up with attachments and requests to read other people’s manuscripts.

These are activities the writing life occasionally allows. It’s a flexible, zero-hour occupation, but also very solitary. It makes demands on the practitioner just as any other job does. It requires patience, discipline and application. Cooks have their kitchens, gardeners their plants, sculptors their materials — but writers, poor beings, have only their imaginations and the blank screen blinking at them.

“Do you write in the mornings?” Another frequent question. Yes, if I have an article, review or essay to write, I will probably rise at 7am and work as much as I can before lunchtime to produce a decent draft, hoping I’ll be deaf to the normal distractions — usually bells, or e-mailed reminders: “your submission is late”. Fiction’s another matter. A story of any length may take weeks, or even years, to form and coalesce — it may also come to the writer in a flash, but all too often inspiration is one of those fantasies that we have when we’re novices, just like the notion that the first draft is the best draft. Once your piece of fiction is written, you have to work at it, cutting, discarding, embellishing and sweating, until at times the finished product has only a fleeting resemblance to the original concept.

So what are the hazards of combining writing with teaching? There was a time, let’s say 20 years ago, that I taught every day, brought home papers to read and mark, spent hours preparing lectures and often, in the evenings, read a book to review, using up the weekends to write occasional prose. The truth is that for many years, while I did, to some extent, regard literary journalism as a professional occupation (it paid for my books and my holidays), I treated fiction as an avocation: a leisure activity, saved for weekends and summer holidays. (Then, as now, I often wrote just one or two stories a year — not a bad thing, as there’s only a limited amount of books we need to add to the world.) I was a teacher who wrote: I taught Urdu for many years, and later history and literature too.

When I taught my first literature class in 1992, a link between my teaching and writing lives began to emerge. That connection became stronger in the last weeks of the 20th century. My second book took several years to appear — nearly six — a common story with many writers, but at least in my case I’d been busy all along, writing and reviewing. (I remember one mortifying moment, when, in 1998, a newspaper referred to me as “the critic Aamer Hussein”, making me realise how much writing fiction mattered to me.) When I was offered a post as a writing fellow at the University of Southampton for a few months, I accepted, without an idea of what the teaching of creative writing entailed. (As the cliché has it, I literally learnt on my feet.) But the pathway to accepting that I was a writer who taught, rather than the inverse, was the one I’d almost inadvertently chosen to follow. I came away from Southampton with a trio of stories that, about two years later, would be published in my third book.

Let me return to those occupational hazards I spoke of. As a part-time teacher of language and then of literature, I’d accepted the split in my working life, but as a writer who was expected to pro-duce books (termed outputs) regularly — and I did — the demands of my writing career became more insistent. Contracts. Deadlines. Travels to festivals and conferences. I wryly recall a period of nearly three years when I was a writing fellow in a department of engineering, and my work consisted of meeting students and correcting essays about — you guessed it — engineering, which resembled no other language I knew. I liked the (mostly foreign) students and I liked my office, but during the first two years I was there I wrote almost no new fiction, and my publishers began to worry that I never again would. I got the job because I was a writer, but it wiped away my desire to write fiction, even though it technically bought me some time: I’d go away from my office and read, and ultimately, during my third year there, I produced several new stories.

Then, nine years ago, I submitted my fourth collection to my editor, and took another job, with tenure this time. I went to teach creative writing to MA students at Southampton: or rather, teach literature to students of creative writing. In this new life, I discovered a major change: the rule of the internet. Students and colleagues now had ways of finding you wherever you were: privacy was a thing of the past. And then, official duties: forms to fill about what you’d done and expected to do, reports and references to write, and manuscripts to read and edit.

Typically, an email would arrive at midnight before a morning class, with a bulky attachment and a semi-apologetic request to read it “if you have time”, which of course meant “right away”. The idea I’d had that I could easily compartmentalise my life into teaching time and writing time proved to be ridiculous. There was barely a waking hour when virtual communication didn’t assail me.

Somehow I managed to produce three new books during the nine years I had tenure at Southampton, but just as in the past these were written on weekends or — increasingly — during my summer or Christmas holidays. (Holidays? We spent several weeks supervising student dissertations, or marking papers.) The problem with teaching creative writing is frequently having to read unedited, unstructured and sometimes badly-written pieces which numb your brain. Editing them on screen is another occupational hazard. Somehow the scratch of a pen on paper has a reassuringly old-fashioned feel, even when you’re scoring out passages of purple prose; but watching colours dance on screen as you edit is another matter.

Perhaps editing online, as well as the constant intrusion of virtual mail, is what I’ll miss least about the teaching life, in which, increasingly, teaching plays a smaller part. I will miss the classroom, though — and the burgeoning rapport with a group with whom you’re likely to work for a year, to establish a particular dynamic that changes with every new cohort.

Can creative writing be taught? A question to which I have no single answer. You can guide apprentice writers to recognise their strengths and to know that writing isn’t merely inspiration; eradicate their prejudices, and above all teach them to edit themselves with a cold eye and a firm hand. But most important in the development of a writer’s craft is the love of reading for its own sake. It is a love that is, in some way, the teaching writer’s primary transferable skill.

An editor can be a good teacher. I remember how my late friend and publisher, Mai Ghoussoub, taught me how to read and reread myself to see whether I had mined every vein in my material to the fullest; how to recognise that I’d said too much, or even more importantly, too little; how very often a story was still only a draft. My stories became longer as I worked with her, until, after her death, I wrote two novels. And today, when I try to pare down my fiction only to its essentials, I feel that the insights I gained from working with her have taught me something I can share with budding writers, however resistant they are to rereading and restructuring work they feel they’ve written in blood and tears. No one wants to ‘kill their darlings’, young writers least of all.

Ultimately I left my university job because I felt that manuscripts, correspondence and administrative responsibilities were overtaking my imagination and limiting my freedom to travel. I have to admit that if I had the chance to revisit my teaching life, I might have chosen to restrict myself to teaching only students of literature. Ultimately, though, it’s been a full and sometimes rewarding tenure.

There’s one last question that I still need to answer. Can one make a living as a full-time writer? Several young hopefuls from the subcontinent ask me if I can find them lucrative commissions writing for papers in the West while they create their masterpieces (for which they also expect large advances). Mostly, to my regret, I can’t help. I’m not a journalist or editor. I never even expected to make writing my career; it just happened on the way to somewhere. I can only say that for me and most others the writing life is hard and doesn’t pay much (if at all). I advise them to carry on with whatever else they do best and carve out time to write until they make their mark: advice that isn’t exactly cheering. And as I tentatively move towards a life that will allow me much more time to follow my favourite pursuits, I still wonder if I’ve really earned the right to my leisure.

AAMER HUSSEIN is a short story writer and novelist living in London.