Writing of all Kinds

I have loved writing since I was about 8 or 9, and I always dreamed about making my living as a writer. The first idea I had was to get a job on a local paper, in the days when you could get trained up from scratch, but it was a world I knew nothing about, including how to find the apprenticeships that may be available. It was sports writing I really wanted to do, but I found out, after some research, that you would start on general work and I knew instinctively that I wouldn’t be able to deal with the more difficult side of the job. I was very awkward around people so I would have been poor at asking questions in the right way. There was no direct route into sports writing so I knocked that idea on the head.

Later on I set my sights on writing about music, because it was something I was confident I could do. Again, the problem was how to get into the field, because the music magazines were closed shops to most of the population. More so than sports writing as it turned out because there was no way of finding the person to contact and no way of practising by writing for fanzines or similar. When I look back, again I wouldn’t have had the people skills to deal with the more difficult side of the work.

Later, I had the idea of writing books and this time I actually got as far as self publishing electronically on Amazon. The problem there was that I opened myself up to other people’s views and some of their views were aggressively negative. After two attempts to put my work out there I retired from the scene, unable to deal with the critics. Were they good books? Probably not although I like to think they had some merit to them. Could I have improved? Certainly I could have done. Would I have ever have been good enough to get someone to publish me? Very unlikely. It is a time consuming and emotionally draining process, plotting, writing and editing a book, and I didn’t have the time or the thick skin necessary to persue it.

Now, you may have noticed a theme here! The truth is that I have always written and I will always write. I have become, I hope, a decent blogger but, as with every other writing based dream, almost certainly not good enough to make a living at it. I now write for myself and for anyone who might want to read it. This means I can be enthusiastic, true to myself and happy with my writing. Perhaps that is the dream I have always had, but I always wonder, ‘What if?’