Media Necromancy: Writing More
Show me a person who weathered 2020 unscathed and I’ll show you a liar. Okay, perhaps not a liar but someone with privilege aplenty I can’t begin to understand. That’s not to say there wasn’t some positive to come from that tumultuous time (adaptation is what makes us human, after all). I’m simply stating the obvious; as a species we were challenged globally while simultaneously battling demons at home individually.
Many of you know my greatest struggle came on the mental health front. Forced to slow down, many issues I’d been battling through (or perhaps running from) caught me. It was like that dust cloud that follows the Road Runner around. I was fine moving forward but as soon as I stopped all the debris in my wake just launched forward, peppering me and everything around me.
Quaint Looney Tunes reference out of the way, I’ll get to the point: I’m not content standing still anymore and I refuse to give into the inertia I found myself victim to before.
Consider this a renewed statement of purpose. Since I was in the second grade, I’ve only ever wanted to do one thing. When every other kid wanted to be a fire fighter or a pterodactyl, I wanted to write (and illustrate) my own books. That was over three decades ago. The kid beguiled by The Phantom Tollbooth and everything Roald Dahl turned into a preteen obsessed with Goosebumps and soon enough Stephen King with healthy doses of Mythology. Along the way I discovered TTRPGs and video games and the possibilities of what a story was or where stories could be told completely changed for me.
In the sixth grade I was told by a teacher that being a writer wasn’t a career and I needed a more realistic path. My earnest response to her was that I’d become a journalist and travel the country in a Scooby Doo Van. The stories I sold to local periodicals would be enough to keep my gas tank full while I kept traveling to seek out the next big scoop. (Not gonna lie, I low-key would still love to do that). VW Bus Jack Kerouac Me without a doubt led to my interest in journalism and this website.
Ignoring that teacher’s words, I went off to college and majored in English-Lit (the better journalism program). I wanted to learn how all the greats did it before me so I could be a great writer too. Maybe along the way a professor would help me find an in with a publisher or periodical or put me on the path to an internship or something. That’s the way it was done I was told but before I could graduate the landscape for the printed word changed. Everything I was taught at university about how to become a published author seemed instantly irrelevant in the face of self-publishing saturation and YouTube popularity contests.
Personality and bombast are the currencies of so-called Nu Media. Chasing virality outweighs the rigorous nature of proper journalistic source building, vetting, and research. Videos don’t need to be accurate if the next one releases before anyone notices the inaccuracies.
“Writing isn’t a real career.” The words from the sixth-grade teacher that I’d gone into college debt to defy were starting to calcify in my head and heart. The worst problem that I discovered post college is that writers can’t eat words and it would be a while before I taught myself how to edit video and audio. I had to get a job. Any job to make ends meet. Unfortunately, life moves faster than the Road Runner and that cloud started to build behind me. I ended up in the trades for very simple reasons: they paid the best among the jobs available.
My path to becoming an accomplished full-time writer changed. Scooby Doo Vans and internships were no longer my way forward. The plan became to work one job to pay the bills but keep writing until something I made got enough attention to let me make the switch. Minus the notoriety, I’ve held that course. I’ve published countless short stories, articles, and poems. Hell, I made a video game in one weekend that has a perfect score on itch.io…
And it’s not enough.
It will never be enough until I can quit my job in the trades and support my family by doing the thing I was put on the Earth to do.
When I clicked “new post” and began to write this, it was meant to be something completely different. It was supposed to be a shameless excuse to share some of my old articles as a way to drum up site traffic before releasing new content. Instead, the history lesson and statement of renewed purpose came out.
All journeys are like that, I suppose. The true destination is a mystery until you get there. For a while I thought my writer’s journey was going nowhere. I refuse to let that be true. The only way forward I see is to write more. Speaking of writing more…