Don’t Let Money Ruin Your Love of Writing
Forget the money, for a moment, and let your words sing life and joy back into your soul.
“Your words flow easily and beautifully,” my sixth-grade teacher said before planting a large, red “A” on the top of my poetry assignment. I reveled in her praise for days, because I’d poured my heart and soul into those poems.
When I was thirteen, I reveled in another milestone. I sold a poem to the “Poet’s Corner” of a magazine and was paid the grand sum of a dollar, which my mother promptly framed.
Spurred by these successes, I bought a notebook and began journaling. I scribbled descriptions, thoughts, emotions, and the minutiae of daily life, and although I sometimes neglected the journal for months, I always picked it up again, pouring my heart onto those blank pages until they were filled with words of anguish, joy, memories and aspirations.
Deciding I wanted to write as a career, I earned a degree in Journalism and began a stint as a newspaper reporter. I was finally being paid a living wage to write! But creativity and love of words deserted me when I had to churn out ten or twelve stories a day, with little time to reread, let alone edit or fine-tune anything. Covering town board meetings, then hunching over a keyboard at midnight to complete an article before deadline has a way of dampening inspiration.
My creativity didn’t remain submerged for long, though. I started a regular column called Off The Beat that included opinion pieces, humor, and stories revolving around encounters with local people. The column was one of my most successful newspaper ventures, but eventually deadlines and pressure to produce led to burnout, I quit, and didn’t write for a while.
Over the next few decades I wrote in fits and starts, collecting a boat load of rejections, a few thrilling successes, delving into self-publishing, and continuing to peck away at my journal, using a keyboard now instead of a pen.
Love of writing, though sometimes submerged beneath the daily business of living or the disillusionment of failure, never deserted me. It was a passion that settled my emotions, helped transform chaos into order and served as an outlet for the creative spark that resides within us all.
When I see writers disappointed over the money they aren’t earning, trying to determine how to gain more followers, a broader audience, a bigger income, I want to say it’s fine and good to earn money writing. We all want to be paid. But don’t lose your first love. Don’t let writing become a chore and a burden. Instead, let your words fly from your heart to the blank page in front of you. Forget the money, for a moment, and let your words sing life and joy back into your soul.
Write with freedom, write with joy, write with abandon, write with passion, then when you have it down on paper, go back and craft your message into something that resonates, sparkles, and inspires. Writing heals, and when it’s healing you it will spark healing in someone else, too.
