In 2004 I was fresh to London and green enough to think I would establish myself as a professional writer within a year. Not quite the wannabe actress arriving in Hollywood and waitressing, but not far off. I came to love London once I’d conquered its back streets and understood its secrets, but my first year living there was bleak and harrowing.  I secured an entry-level job in the publishing industry that covered my rent and nothing more. I lived in a house share in the badlands of South London, and one of my housemates was an actor who was paid one time with six months’ supply of a breakfast cereal that he kindly shared with the rest of us. When he realized that my diet consisted solely of these sugary puffs he offered to help get me a part-time job where he worked between auditions: as a writer of sex-related messages to men who paid for the thrill of receiving them.  “Don’t judge,” he said. “It’s flexible and it pays O.K.” Feeling prudish, I turned him down at first, but that month my paycheck was barely in my bank account before it was thoroughly spent. So I asked him to tell me more.  The office was in Kings Cross, a grim part of London full of warehouses and alleyways best avoided. I was surprised to be led inside a room resembling a straightforward call center: beige walls, cell booths with individual computers and swivel chairs, a large pin board with a staff schedule and a kitchen area with tea-making facilities.  The guy in charge was a pleasant enough man in his late 30s. He led me to a booth and pointed to a screen where streams of messages were queued up, similar to a chat room. He said he would leave me for a minute and asked me to read the screen while he was gone. I looked. “What are you wearing?” “Hey, so what are you doing?” “Wanna talk?” Mild, entry-level chat-room openers. He came back.  “Does this content offend you?” he asked.  “Do you know how to use a PC?”  It paid £11 an hour, and I worked two nights a week. Men (I never encountered anyone claiming to be a woman) sent messages in response to ads that said, “Looking for single women near you?” They texted from their phones, and I answered them via computer.  There were a range of identity options for me to click on and pretend to be: Inga, new to London; Susan, bored and looking for trouble — that kind of thing. The aim was to keep the man at the other end replying because he was forking over £1.50 a text. The overall challenge was to win the Queen of the Night award for the receiver of the most texts, the winner getting a £25 bonus. The first time I achieved that lofty height, I felt oddly proud.  I was embarrassed about doing this work, so I kept it quiet. I didn’t mention it in the publishing house or in the pub with friends. It was a job on the fringes of the sex industry, but strict rules existed: no under-18s, no violence, no incest; any mention of these subjects and I had to “terminate the dialogue.” It was forbidden to give out personal information, to arrange to meeting with anyone or to respond from one’s own phone rather than through the automated system.  I thought I would be shocked by these anonymous voices coming in from the night, but I quickly discovered that the sexual imagination of the average man who responds to such ads tends to be fairly predictable, so much so that generic response keys had been programmed. If I steered the texter down particular garden paths it would often be a while before I needed to use any innovation. I set myself a challenge of working my way through the Russian greats during my shifts. Reading Dostoyevsky I would be pressing the key that triggered the message “37F,” in response to the common question “What bra size are you?” Once I had a handle on how it all worked, it was the easiest money in the world.  But I wasn’t writing, which was the whole point of my being in this city. I brought my laptop to the office and devised a system. Ten minutes of quick-fire response to the queues of messages, 20 minutes of writing. At first, this didn’t work at all. I would stare at my empty document and blink and then turn back to the sexually charged messages and respond to a man who wanted to know how long my hair was.  The hair guy; I’d had him before. “Long,” I typed. “Really long.” “Wow,” he answered. “Can I cut it all off?” “Sure.” Unless I didn’t feel like talking to him and then, “Short,” I would type. “Really short.” And he would be gone.  My publishing job involved a lot of filling envelopes and typing up minutes. It was a challenge to stay awake if I had been answering texts all night. I kept trying to see through to the bigger picture, a day when I would understand the whole magnificent process of the creation of the shiny and magical product I had worshiped since the age of 3: the book! But in reality I just went up and down to the mailroom all day, and there was no contact with the mystical departments of editorial and marketing.  My nighttime job quickly became more productive. Occasionally someone would break through with an alarming suggestion or image, but I’d just hit the terminate button and have a drink of coffee to repurify my mind. In the 20-minute sections I has created for myself, I wrote memories, thoughts, snatches of dialogue, sometimes sketches and ideas. Soon I noticed that I was writing approximately 350 words in each slot. Before long I was producing 2,000 words or more each shift.  I did not write a best-selling novel about a girl working in a seedy part of London, but I learned how to write without pressure and self-criticism, and as a consequence I began to generate material that would later become a first draft of a short story. That story, many years down the line, expanded into a novel. I learned that the larger pattern only comes with the creation of small segments and that all the artistry is in the stitching up.  One night a person texted through the usual questions: “How old are you?” “What are you wearing?” When we were through the preliminaries, his next message read: Have you ever read Gogol’s ‘The Overcoat?’ ”  “Are you kidding?” I replied. “I’ve just read it. I mean, I literally just finished it.”  The response came through: “NO! I love it, do you?”  “Yes! What do you love about it?”  We spent the next hour discussing the story of Akaky saving his tiny salary to try to buy a coat, and the meanness of his life, and all the time I was aware that this discussion was costing this man money.  “Would you like to meet, to talk more about Gogol?” he asked.  I tapped the desk. I saw from the tally on the screen that I would most likely win Queen of the Night after this lengthy discussion, and I was pleased.  “Thank you,” I typed, “but I can’t meet.”  He replied: “What bra size are you?” And I clicked my handy generic response button: “37F.”  Suzanne Joinson, who lives in Sussex, England, is the author of “A Lady Cyclist’s Guide to Kashgar” (Bloomsbury). Send submissions to onwork@nytimes.com.  A version of this article appears in print on April 26, 2015, on page BU7 of the New York edition with the headline: Dirty Talk and Dostoyevsky on the Night Shift. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
A writer new to London finds her voice during a part-time job responding to sex messages from men who rarely wanted to talk about great literature.