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.
