There’s no question: being a TA is a demanding job that can often add extra stress to a challenging semester. No matter how hard you try to avoid it, a marking deadline always seems to conflict with an upcoming story deadline of your own. You sift through piles of student stories, pointing out the underdeveloped inner journey of the protagonist or the abundance of grammatical mistakes in the work of students who may or may not revisit the piece and work on revising it once the semester is over. Meanwhile, your own story is sitting unwritten in a nonexistent Word Doc on your computer. Sure, it’s great to have a little extra money coming in, but is a TA-ship really worth diverting focus from your own work to critique the work of others? Wouldn’t that time be better spent agonizing over your own drafts?
You could probably tell from the rhetorical question set-up: my personal take is, no, it wouldn’t be better spent that way. And it absolutely is worth opening up the tunnel vision of your own writing habits to assist with the work of others.
As a TA, you basically get paid to (re)take foundational creative writing courses. You become intimate with the fundamentals, the basics of writing. (And this time you have to know them well, because you’re responsible for explaining them to the students.) Not only that, but you also have to consider and apply these fundamentals when you mark. Every. Single. Time. You need to be able to justify issuing a 3.5/5 on story structure somehow! It makes you diligent in assessing the bones of the story. And then, guess what? When you finally get the chance to return to your own writing, you can assess it with the eagle eye of a seasoned writing teacher: the setting is lacking, this character has an unclear desire, there’s no dialogue—why on earth is there no dialogue?!
It’s all very wax-on wax-off. By doing the work that feels like a distraction, you’re actually developing your own skill and eye. You’re better equipped to face the writing challenges ahead. And hey, you’re also getting paid.