My life has no shortage of regrets. Laying the personal ones aside for now (and maybe for the next decade or two), my greatest professional regret is drifting away from the discipline of writing every single day.
I was a bit of a child prodigy (a very bit). I always got “A’s” on book reports, term papers and such.
The other day, I dug into some old boxes in the basement and found a wealth of materials from those old days – journals, diaries, poems, short stories – all on yellowing paper, most hand-written in fading blue ink. All were dreadfully dreadful by my current standards.
The problem was, I think, I hadn’t really done a lot of living at that point in my life, so the admonition to “write what you know” predictably resulted in relative drivel. Yet my high school and college mentors seemed to always feel I was ahead of the curve, and never let me get frustrated.
In college, I majored in journalism and creative writing, producing hard news, features, fiction, poetry – you name it – virtually every day of my young life.
When I finished school, I spent 12 years in daily newspaper journalism … but as I gained experience, I predictably became a supervisor, an editor, a manager. I wrote less and less. Eventually, I fled professional journalism entirely, in favor of the more lucrative (I thought) PR and marketing departments of some fairly large organizations.
I became Willie Loman – a salesman without a future … and not much of a past, truth be known. My “Great American Novel” was not only unpublished, it was largely unwritten. Life got in the way of writing – and writing was my life.
One month ago today, I cast off those chains. I created an alter ego – The Fixer – and built a website at www.fixadocument.com. I started to blog every day – long blogs, because I was too busy to write short ones.
In the short run, I’ll make enough money to scrape by, writing, editing, blogging, ghostwriting for companies … helping students break down the barriers that poor writing imposes between the great ideas in their heads and the full and complete understanding of their teachers and profs.
In the not-so-short, but still-not-long term, I’ll publish and market a book about writing – I could call it Writing is Easy, but the name’s probably already taken.
Ooohh … just Googled that, and found a cool quote from some guy named Gene Fowler:
“Writing is easy. You just stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.”
Blood or no blood, writing makes you immortal (though not necessarily famous or rich). One of these days, I’ll be dead, too. Hope some young punk finds a reference to my novel, my book … heck, even this lonely little blog … and finds something to keep him going on a blustery Monday morning.
With that comforting thought in mind, I’ll continue to stare each day at a blank page, knowing that even if it’s filled with little more than junk by the end of the day, I can always edit it tomorrow.
If you’re going to be a Writer, you’ve got to write.
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