From passion to full time job

What do you do with a whole day to yourself? For me, it is always an opportunity to write. Writing is what comes to my mind on the first place. It comes, however, with a mixture of excitement and dread. Excitement, because I just love bringing up words, producing sentences, and pounding on the keyboard; dread, because more often than not, the result falls short of my expectations.

See, I want to make a living by writing. I want to research stories about people and places, and then write about it. That is, in fact, how I started writing. I worked for a local newspaper, writing the weekly neighborhood news. Later on, I moved on to the daily newspaper.  Yes, writing was part of the job, as it was reporting, reading, and talking to lots of people every day. We produced the news, but we also got lots of news. People called to the newsroom and looked for us to publish their stories. There were lots of stories to be written.

Wanting to write out of that sphere has been unfulfilling, to say the least. The timeliness of the stories, the potential audience and the relevance of the topic weigh heavy on me when I start writing. I oftentimes miss the deadline when writing about calendar related events. Not because I have not written in time, but because I look forward to produce a piece that gets published. When I am done, I run out of time and energy for selling it. Then there is the audience. I am aware that there are more blogs out there than there are readers, but I still want to write for someone other than me. That is why any topic won’t do. It has to be, as I learned in the newspaper, relevant, timely, and of wide interest.    

Reflecting on it, I believe working for a newspaper was both the best and the worst thing that ever happened to me. It gave me the opportunity to grow as a reporter, as a critical thinker, as a flexible writer. It also gave me a chance to meet some of the most interesting people I have ever met. However, it imprinted this idea on me that publishing is the goal of writing; it also restrained my thinking to consider just a narrow range of writing topics. Again, if it is not relevant, timely, and of wide interest, there is no point in writing about it.

Re-reading, though, I can see the faults in the thoughts. Any topic can be worthy of publishing. Just look at today’s newspapers: food, fitness, decoration and traveling compete for space with economics, politics and sports. There is no need to be a reporter to be able to write. There is the need, though, to be a good writer to find a job that pays for doing it. There is my new challenge.