I want to write more
Here’s the deal: I want to write more. Writing has always been my life’s passion, or at least it was supposed to be my life’s passion. It’s the act my soul has always yearned to do. Even when I was a kid, I always wrote. In fact, I struggle to remember a time where I wasn’t writing. I attempted my first novel at the ripe old age of eight on an old electric typewriter that was intended to collect dust in my basement bedroom. It was titled “The Great Balloon Race” about a hot air balloon race. Before you ask, no I have no idea where I got that idea from. I never even saw a hot air balloon in real life at that point in my young life. But I actually got as far as writing the first page before the ribbon on the typewriter broke and no adult ever came around to fix it so that’s kind of fun.
I used to collect pages of blank lined paper in an accordion folder in my backpack, spending my quiet time in school writing endless short stories or outlining large concept novels beyond the scope of my young writing ability. Once when a friend and I were both bored during class, I offered her one of my blank lined pieces of paper. I remember getting confused when she stared at me blankly in response because she didn’t know what to do with the prize. For me, a piece of paper represented infinite entertainment. For her, it was just paper. My second attempt at another novel even came with my first laptop gifted to me from my parents during middle school when it was supposed to be used for school. I wrote a middle grade novel about cliques that actually reached 60k words and a full conclusion, but it never saw the light of day for full publication. Mostly because no one should be forced to read 60k words written by a socially awkward twelve year old dealing with friendship drama, but it was a cute endeavor.
Writing continued as a constant hum of activity in the background of my life from middle school through high school. After a long day of competitive softball practice and AP homework, I would stay awake until the early hours of the morning tinkering on my young adult superhero novel that was finished and restarted about a dozen times or drafting more short stories. While the rest of the world slept, I cherished my rare moments of quiet to focus on my writing before waking up at six in the morning again to go to my daily early morning workout. Before you ask, no I also have no idea how I survived on three hours of sleep a night aside from blaming the hubris of youth.
Despite my insane softball, work, and study schedules, I even found the time to join the school newspaper, working as a reporter before writing my way to my own humor column that was published monthly through the paper. I was never interested in becoming an editor, mainly because my busy softball schedule wouldn’t allow it, but also because editors didn’t write as much as a regular reporter or columnist. I wanted to write so write I did. When iPod touches got popular and allowed for easy internet access on the go (no not iPhones yet – don’t come at me about my age or income bracket), I’d publish short stories to various chat forums while hanging out at free wifi locations in between school and softball practice. I even gained a small online following for a serial I wrote titled Love Letters to Heaven about a young woman finding her way through the grief of losing her high school boyfriend by writing letters to him beyond the grave. Every Thursday, I would write a new “Thursday Tale” for my friends where we all starred in a cast of exaggerated versions of ourselves that went on a multitude of comedic adventures together. I’d draft the story out in one go on a lined piece of paper during my lunch hour before handing it off to my friends so they could all read our latest adventure and pass it around to each other as we went to our different afternoon classes. Somehow, the Thursday Tale always found its way back to me by the end of the day.
My relentless passion and dedication for writing followed me into college where, in the last week of my senior year of high school, I switched from being a pre-medicine major to a journalism major. The idea was that I wanted to pursue writing as a career since it was such a joy in my life and, in my pragmatic Midwest middle class ways, I figured Journalism was the most efficient career path for a writer rather than English or Creative Writing. In hindsight, I wish I just did English or Creative Writing because my Journalism degree has been just as useful as either of those degrees would’ve been and I probably would’ve enjoyed my classes more. But I did the best I could with the information I had at the time. My dalliance with YouTube was also part of my grand plan that the growing video platform could eventually be used to promote my writing career, once I ever got around to figuring out how to make my writing a career.
However, what I didn’t expect was that college was going to be some of the worst years of my life. Instead of becoming my unstoppable career, writing became my only escape from the three part-time jobs needed to fund my tuition while I attended school full time, over three hundred rejections for that beloved superhero novel I spent all of high school writing, toxic friends, pointless college classes that felt like a waste of time to milk more credits towards my degree than true education, and an aimless future. Writing was no longer a joy. It became my lifeline. In my darker moments, the hope that I could eventually build a future for myself through writing was my only light. I stopped writing because I wanted to and instead started writing because I felt like I had to. I had to write so I could use my writing for my eventual writing career I was still pinning my future on. I also had to write because it was the only tool I had to navigate my inner turmoil created from the chaos of my college years. As a socially awkward creature of the Midwest, I was not adept at expressing my emotions externally. Writing gifted me a safe channel to communicate my distress, even if the only reader of my words was myself.
Eventually, I escaped hell and graduated college with that Journalism degree. I entered the workforce with next to no internship experience because I could only work jobs that paid and a limited professional writing portfolio as my school opted to wipe our media archives about two weeks after my graduation. Before you ask, no I still have not forgiven my alma mater for this transgression. They still ask me for donations every year though, which is a bold move but you have to respect the grind and I did enjoy, like, three things from my college experience. Maybe five, if you ask me on a good day. But I’m still not donating anything to them.
As one can imagine, I did not find any writing jobs. With my poor undergrad experience, I found no appeal (or tuition money) to pursue a post-grad education. So I found a corporate management job that I hated that went bankrupt after three months and a job at an escape room immediately afterwards that went bankrupt after six months. After those two failed post-grad jobs, I accepted a job as a nanny for two amazing young ladies. I loved those girls and that job, but it still wasn’t a writing career. I supported that job with a handful of other part time jobs around town as I tried to break into the freelance writer game. I wanted to build my portfolio and got far in a couple of interviews, but nothing happened. But still, I counted myself lucky. Nannying those young ladies gave me copious time with my laptop as I waited for them to complete their activities that I was paid to monitor, but not fully directly involve myself in as they could independently manage themselves. While waiting for responses on my freelance pieces (mostly rejections), I ended up finishing a silly young adult paranormal comedy about ghosts that I originally outlined while bored in class in college. Due to the niche genre, my own frustrations with failing to break into the traditional publishing market, my impatience with my freelance pieces failing to publish, and all of that free time available to me while nannying, I decided to self-publish How to Survive a Ghost Story.
But How to Survive a Ghost Story couldn’t pay the bills. In fact, despite some relative success with the initial sales, I’m pretty sure I’m still in the red on that one eight years later. Nannying, while incredibly fulfilling, also couldn’t cover insurance since I was aging out of my parents’ plan so I had to find something else to support my life. You can celebrate the starving writer all you want in gross over-simplified fantasies about pursuing passion over a paycheck, but it’s not actually that fun figuring out how to budget a $5 coffee in between student loan payments while still living with your parents. It also wasn’t very fun on the days I had to jump between three different shifts across three different jobs, occasionally accidentally pulling a sixteen hour day as I wasn’t in any financial position to turn down shifts. Writing was now a hindrance to my life with the time required to pursue it for such little payoff.
Pet tax - Mollie Moo is the best thing to happen to me and all because I surrendered my passion for the paycheck <3
In my pursuit for a stable income, I landed a job in a call center working tech support for software. It was an easy corporate 9-5 office job with a steady paycheck and insurance where I figured I could still have time to write in between calls or after work. But, as it turns out, I was really good at tech support. I grew fast in the company and the call center job became one of the best things to happen to me. With the stable paycheck and work environment, I was able to make friends my own age, collect enough paychecks to find a place on my own, adopt a dog, and grow an actual career rather than fumble for anyone to even recognize my work let alone pay me for it. I became the actual nightmare of aspiring artists everywhere: I sacrificed my passion to become a corporate drone and my life turned out better for it.
Don’t get me wrong: I still made a valiant effort to continue writing. At one point, while discontent with my position in a company, I finished and self-published Fatal Flaws, an adult science fiction book that I started writing in college during the height (or lowpoint) of my college experience about a computer science major dropout fighting an evil AI android army while facing her personal flaws. I’m personally very proud of it, but I think maybe two other people have read it and I didn’t give it the same care to promote it as I did for How to Survive a Ghost Story so it’s also far from defining my writing career any time soon. Occasionally, I’d post a blog post to my website when I was particularly fired up about an issue, but the posts were inconsistent and mostly nonsense to make me feel productive about pursuing writing despite my lack of interest in it.
But, ultimately, I had lost my joy with writing when it failed to become a career for me. There was some bitterness with all of the rejection I had faced with my writing and how I recognized it became a toxic escape for me rather than a joy. Efforts to submit to literary magazines and journals felt futile with $20 application fees just to be told “better luck next time”. I already self-published two novels and found the effort required to promote them in an already over-saturated market to be exhausting. Traditional publishing left a bad taste in my mouth after I enjoyed my experiences with self-publishing and hated my experiences chasing literary agents to represent my work. Either way, it didn’t seem worth the effort to try to write more novels if they wouldn’t be read by anyone and I was doing fine in that time without relying on the hope of their eventual income. There was no need to expand my writing portfolio when I could make a living without it.
Seven years later after joining the corporate world, I’m still not a writer by trade. A full writing career that can fully sustain me feels more like a vague fantasy that could happen if I wish on enough stars than a real possibility. I have two self-published books, two long forgotten writing credits with now defunct websites, and a blog I posted four whole times to in the year of 2025. One of those posts was about the Transformers movie franchise, in case you’re wondering how seriously I take things.
But the act of writing still calls to me, echoing the heartbeat that kept me steady in my youth. Now that I’ve taken some time away from it, developed an alternative career that can survive without it, and stabilized my life, writing once again beckons me to remember the joy of my youth. Writing no longer needs to be a career for me or, really, anything productive to my life. It can be purely a joy again. The joy that fueled me to stay awake deep into the night to keep engaging with it, to keep playing with sentence structures and characters until they could bend to the narrative I was attempting to create. It can once again be about the joy of creating something out of nothing with only a writing source and the whim of my thoughts to do so all on my own.
My third book is currently sitting with my editor. It’s probably one of my favorite things I’ve ever written. I wrote it simply to satisfy that deep echo from my soul demanding words to be written and to have fun with writing again. I wrote in snippets after work, in between meetings, and on long coffee dates with myself when I just wanted an excuse to leave the house. The novel was a joy to write and I’m doing my best to keep the vibe of writing only for joy by letting my editor take her time with it, by not pressuring myself to hold it to a deadline for publication. But I’m not rushing into drafting my next novel either, instead lingering on the story development and playing with the characters I want to include before I get to work on actually writing words.
I’m trying to re-vitalize my blog on my website by publishing to Substack too. Hopefully a slightly wider net of potential readers will capture my interest with my own writing long enough for me to continue the habit, but it’s a bit of a shot in the dark. I’m just not interested in social media influencing anymore. I already played the social media influencer game for a spell when I was young and cute in college, found my own success with it, and now I’m just suffering through the concept of social media as needed. I find the increasingly low quality of content curated on social media platforms to be a result of cheap shots at attention on an extremely over-saturated market and don’t think I need to be further involved in it.
But it’s fun to re-engage with writing again. It’s fun to look at the clock and be pleasantly surprised at the realization about how much time was absorbed while working on a piece. I want to keep writing, but I’m still working on the how and the why for the act after spending so much time believing it could only be done if I truly defined my life and career solely on the act. But rest assured, if I found a way to keep writing with only three hours of sleep a night, I think I can find a way to keep writing as a thirty year old corporate drone with a stable paycheck and livelihood. It’s just a matter of treating the passion as a joy again rather than as a job.