I feel like venting a little. I am so sick and tired of seeing the writing profession idealized the way it is and I want to bitch about it a little bit. I bought into the crap about professional writing being a kind of a dream job. I figured that since I won a bunch of essay contests as a teenager that it must be my destiny to be a writer. I had big dreams that someday I would write a New York Times bestseller and make boatloads of money. When it came time to choose a "day" job, I figured I should do something related to writing and I ended up a tech journalist. Big mistake because I don't give a rat's ass about "tech" and especially not bullshit like "web 2.0" and "service-oriented architecture."
Of course, I have been a moderately successful writer even outside my stints in tech journalism. I've written several nonfiction books and I have a cushy freelance gig with a website that pays a decent amount of money writing about something that has nothing to do with tech. But even when the material is interesting, the job still sucks. There is more administrative editorial crap like fiddling around with markup for a content management system and "tweaking SEO" than actual writing. And it's not just the web stuff. In my formerly a labor-of-love writing of a nationally distributed nonfiction book and signing with an AAR literary agent (many writers' dream), I found out that writing books is nothing like the idealized daydream that I had when I was 18. You have to rewrite the crap about 1007 times to fit some editor's nitpicks, spend hours redoing your bibliography that you autonumbered in Microsoft Word because the editor wanted to split the sources by chapter, make yourself available for boneheaded questions by unqualified editors of national magazines who can't even string together a coherent sentence in an email, and all the while you're expected to present your publisher with a marketing plan and do the jobs of the public relations department. And on top of all of that, you only get an advance of $2500 for your hundreds of hours of work -- and if you're lucky, you might be able to dream of seeing a royalty check in five years after publication, assuming your publisher doesn't take the book out of print. Gee, I'd have had a better ROI for my time if I spent those hours working at McDonald's.
Here's the worst thing. I was a creative writer when I first started on this failed debacle. I wrote pretty damned good and thought-provoking essays (at least as good as you can expect from a teenager). I had a lot of great ideas for fiction stories, and although my first drafts of novels sucked, I'll bet I would have become good at it eventually. I *might* have actually written the bestselling novel that I dreamed about. But I never should have tried to make money at writing as a profession. It would have been better if it stayed a hobby. I can't write for fun anymore. It is always a job. I will sit and try to write something creative, but it just won't come out anymore even though the words exist as abstracts in my mind. I might have slain my muse forever by trying to write crappy buzzword infused bs press release rewrites for money. I hold out hope that I will begin to write creatively again once I've distanced myself from the sad Greek tragedy that is my writing career. My little brother has the right idea. He wants to write creative and dramatic screenplays. His college professors in his English degree program think he is the real deal. So he took his English degree and applied to the police academy. Now there's a way to get inspiration.
Moral: Writing sucks as a profession. At least for me. I'm sure there are people out there who love it despite the above crap, but I am someone who was a true believer and if you told me ten years ago that I'd be writing these words I'd have laughed in your face. Anyone who thinks they want to be a writer needs to take a long hard look at the reality before they waste a decade of their life on it like I did. I'm going back to school to become a nurse because I want to do something that matters. I used to "write" as a hobby, but now I knit, garden, and cook because I want to have something tangible and nice at the end of my labors.
