Creativity and
(Making a) Living
with Tom Glasson
image by Field
words by KaldorTom Glasson has a gentle manner – a manner that feels much more “behind the scenes” than “in the spotlight”.
Don’t be fooled. For around 300 nights in 2013 and 2014, his friendly face and sharp delivery dominated a ten-minute slot on national television.
But if you ask him to spruik legal services, he’ll be more bashful.
“I’m at once terrified by – and in awe of – the amount of work partners do to keep work coming in,” he explains. “It’s like pitching for gigs.” Just like his career, conversation with Glasson crosses back and forth from law to comedy. He is a self-described “daywalker”, a vampire that can survive alongside the living and the dead. (It’s fair to assume that lawyers land on the worse side of that metaphor.)
Being a lawyer was something Glasson learnt, from university and a decade in the industry. Being creative came more naturally: “creativity for me is my lifeblood, to put it simply”. Since he could write, Glasson has been writing stories – and his talent for it has led him to write with organisations ranging from Greenpeace to Google.
If creativity is lifeblood – the stuff of living – then the challenge for Glasson, like for many others, is how to be creative while still making a living. Before returning to the legal industry at the start of 2019, Glasson took time out to pursue some personal writing projects that had been “simmering forever”. He describes the experience as “the least financially rewarding, and most emotionally rewarding, year of my life”.
Glasson is matter of fact about the forces at play here, pointing out that there’s no summer clerkship for being a writer. (Well, if there is, it’s probably unpaid.) He continues on this thread:
I think you’d find an enormous number of wildly creative people working in high-end professions – not because they don’t know how to be creative, but because the sensible gene overrides the creative one.
And so it went with Glasson. The exigencies of a growing family (he has a son) and the cost of living (they live in Sydney), drove a return to Allens, the law firm he’d left 10 years earlier.
But when Glasson left Allens in 2009, he was an IP lawyer. Now he’s back as a Content Specialist – a dynamic role that depends more on his abilities as a story-teller than as a practitioner.
Surely, then, he has found that holy grail for the sensible creative: a role where he’s able to do what he loves and be paid for it? Glasson laughs: “Not in the most direct sense, no, but I’m certainly a lot closer to it.”
So if creativity is living for Glasson, then perhaps the law has become livelihood? Glasson would also resist this conclusion. The analysis is too stark – incapable of capturing the nuances of a career in which writing and the law have been mutually reinforcing.
Glasson credits his time as a lawyer with teaching him how to write for an audience, which he describes as “the essential mindset” for creating good television. As the host of The Roast, a daily comedy news show, Glasson and his collaborators had to become “ephemeral experts” on a new subject every night. In Glasson’s assessment, he wouldn’t have been able to do the show without being a lawyer for a couple of years first.
If creativity is living, then perhaps the law is livelihood? Glasson resists this conclusion: it is incapable of capturing the nuances of a career in which writing and the law have been mutually reinforcing.
Now that he’s returned to the industry with a mandate to engage clients, Glasson is drawing heavily from his experience outside the law. His hypothesis is that there’s a “narrow prism” through which all content should be written if you want your readers to care: “a binary of risk or reward”.
A “binary of risk or reward” can also feel like what’s at stake for anyone who wants to draw on their creativity to make a living. Glasson, at least, has struck an enviable balance. But that’s not where he’ll settle.
A long-time film critic, he’s recently started writing his own screenplays (partly to give him more credibility when he reviews the work of others). Buoyed by the success of his debut work, Glasson can already see the path to where creativity is both lifeblood and livelihood: “I’ll write another one and another one and then, perhaps one day, get to a point where that is the job.”
Tom Glasson is a Content Specialist (and former Intellectual Property lawyer) at Allens. He also works as a writer, film critic, creative consultant and media commentator for outlets such as the ABC, Guardian Australia and Concrete Playground. He was the host of the satirical news show The Roast and his debut screenplay “Thembi” placed as a Top 10 Grand Finalist in both the New York Screenwriting Competition and the PAGE Screenwriting Competition in Los Angeles.