I have finally accepted that I’m a writer

About a month ago at my day job, I was assigned an urgent writing task. I managed to turn around some squeaky clean copy at warp speed that quickly moved up the chain with no edits.

“I feel like James does this in his sleep,” my colleague wrote in an email.

She wasn’t wrong.

“Haha,” I wrote back. “It’s real easy. All you need to do is write 1,500 articles and columns over 10 years under insane deadline pressure at a major daily newspaper.”

One thing that not a lot of people know about me (until now, I guess), is that, for the most part, I hated being a journalist. It was one of those things that I started doing and turned out to be good at. So for a good dozen or so years, that’s what I did.

Throughout those 12 years, all I did was look for a way to escape writing as a career. I went down all kinds of paths, some sillier than others.

Searching for … something

I wanted to be an artist. I studied for the LSAT for a while before tapering off. If you’re old enough to remember the Chris Moneymaker poker boom, I even had dreams of playing cards professionally. Graphic design, stock trading, entrepreneur … you name it, I probably thought about trying to become it.

All I wanted to be was … not a writer.

Once, I was on assignment in Barbados. I was sitting in my hotel room half in the bag (maybe fully in the bag), and I remembered that someone somewhere said you should think about what you loved doing as a kid and that’s probably what you should move toward career-wise.

Wearing neon wasn’t a job (I was a kid in the 90s). I did love drawing, and I’ve always been fascinated with art. I live in a city with a national gallery and it’s one of my favourite places to be in the world. I just wasn’t all that good at drawing and I didn’t have the intrinsic drive to do it every day in order to get better at it.

I loved music, but again, sitting in front of one of those metal stick book holders and plunking away on a guitar for hours at a time just couldn’t hold my attention.

I sure did love to write though. I remember in about Grade 5, we had to write some short stories on the computer (writing on the computer was a big deal at that time!). Most kids wrote a couple half-assed pages and called it a day. Mine wound up being a 40-page, single-spaced, humour-infused tale about the trials and tribulations of a professional hockey team.

I think I loved to write because I loved to read. By the time I was writing like that, I’d already started regularly reading the newspaper and novels written for adults (my Grade 5 book report was on Jurassic Park).

I see the same in my son now. When COVID closed schools here, he ripped through around 30 novels by the time classrooms opened up again.

I loved writing when I was a kid, yet I hated it as an adult. I would think: “how do I develop a better-than-average skill that I love performing and that will also result in me collecting large sums of money?”

The problem with developing a better-than-average skill is that it takes a long time and, the older you get, the harder it is to learn one from scratch. When COVID started, I decided I was going to devote a bunch of lockdown time to learning how to draw better. I really did give it a couple good months, hours a day, but man was it a struggle. I’d keep hitting plateaus and getting depressed. Meanwhile, my son would try it and make insane amounts of progress in very short periods of time. I was happy for him but deeply annoyed for myself.

Meanwhile, I had a ready-made, profitable skill sitting idle. I was a professional writer. I’d honed my craft over decades to the point that I was excellent at it and it came very easily to me. Bonus: I actually DID love it at one point.

Why did I hate it now?

Partly it was the money thing. I was writing solely to get paid and nothing more. I discovered the uselessness of that after I left the newspaper and tried to start some web sites on my own. I’d get all jazzed up about conceiving of and building sites that I thought might generate ad revenue, and then they would kind of just peter out and die.

Writing for me

I’ve finally figured it out, though. I didn’t hate writing after all — I hated writing about things I didn’t care about. As and introvert, I also hated the amount I had to interact with others every. single. day. just to complete my newspaper pieces on the things I didn’t care about or want to write about.

I was never writing for me.

That starts now. I love this platform because it’s built for writers. Starting publications, monetizing, sharing, etc. It’s all done with a couple clicks of a button. You can just write. So that’s what I’m going to do now. A lot of it. For me.

Because that’s what I am. I’m not an artist. I’m not a poker player. I’m not a stock trader or a lawyer.

I am a writer. I’m finally OK with that. And I finally love it again.

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