My Future as a Writer
Hello, hello! I hope everyone is doing well! I know I am, especially today! Today is the day that I move to writing full time! As you can probably tell by the amount of exclamation points that I have already used, I am extremely excited to take this leap. So, today's post is going to be about how I came to the decision of quitting my secure paycheck job and risking it all on something that may not pan out well.
From a young age I've always had a passion for stories and story-telling. I can remember always starting stories and writing pages and pages only to never finish them. As I grew older, I started to read more and I stopped writing as much, choosing to focus on other things as well; history, sport, video games, girls. But that need to write always stuck with me. It wasn't the blazing fire it once was, but the embers remained, just waiting to be rekindled. Moving forward I went to University to study History to become an Archaeologist but changed quickly into English but kept a more wider History base. It was a bit of a dog's breakfast my time at Uni, but after four years I left with a Diploma. From there I didn't do anything. Having spent so long with little money, I was only concerned where my next paycheck was coming from. I bounced from job to job doing things that were as far away from writing as they could possibly get. Making money was the only goal that I had on my mind at that time and while that isn't always a bad goal, for me it began to take a toll on my mental health. I was doing jobs that didn't really have any kind of structure that would allow me to climb and even when it did, I had no drive to do so. They were just jobs that allowed me to get that paycheck. In that time, I found myself coming back to writing and reading, something that I had left behind and it was illuminating. I remembered how they made me feel, the embers had started to glow hot again. I began to take a step back from how I saw the world and realized that I had a great opportunity in front of me, if I was willing to risk pretty much everything. I began putting thought into how I would accomplish this change and it was at that time that I found an article that made me ugly cry as I read it. The article itself is about whether or not you should quit your job to write full time and it really resonated with me. Writing was something that I had always treated as a hobby, something that I used to pass the time. I wasn't giving the it the respect that I think it deserves and that was the main point of the article. It was the final proverbial straw that broke the camel's back for me and I decided it was time. I am extremely lucky to have an incredibly supportive and loving girlfriend who could understand what I wanted to accomplish and was more than happy to help support us through what will be a very trying time. But this is something that I want to do for the rest of my life. I want to be able to be apart of peoples lives like the thousands of books I have read have done for me. So I have taken the leap without a safety net. This post is my first post as a full time writer (soon to be author) and I am terrified. What if not a single person reads this? What if I can never write a successful book? I don't think I have ever been more terrified of something in my life. But, that isn't necessarily a bad thing. It'll give me drive to write. It'll allow to for me to hold myself accountable to write more, to write better. It'll do exactly what I wanted it to do when I first thought about quitting my job to write. It'll let me give writing the respect it deserves, to allow me to able to hopefully do this for the rest of my life.
So, for the people reading this now, thank you! Thank you for allowing me to have a platform to do what I love. Get ready for the future because, as a very talented man once wrote, I am not throwing away my shot!
From a young age I've always had a passion for stories and story-telling. I can remember always starting stories and writing pages and pages only to never finish them. As I grew older, I started to read more and I stopped writing as much, choosing to focus on other things as well; history, sport, video games, girls. But that need to write always stuck with me. It wasn't the blazing fire it once was, but the embers remained, just waiting to be rekindled. Moving forward I went to University to study History to become an Archaeologist but changed quickly into English but kept a more wider History base. It was a bit of a dog's breakfast my time at Uni, but after four years I left with a Diploma. From there I didn't do anything. Having spent so long with little money, I was only concerned where my next paycheck was coming from. I bounced from job to job doing things that were as far away from writing as they could possibly get. Making money was the only goal that I had on my mind at that time and while that isn't always a bad goal, for me it began to take a toll on my mental health. I was doing jobs that didn't really have any kind of structure that would allow me to climb and even when it did, I had no drive to do so. They were just jobs that allowed me to get that paycheck. In that time, I found myself coming back to writing and reading, something that I had left behind and it was illuminating. I remembered how they made me feel, the embers had started to glow hot again. I began to take a step back from how I saw the world and realized that I had a great opportunity in front of me, if I was willing to risk pretty much everything. I began putting thought into how I would accomplish this change and it was at that time that I found an article that made me ugly cry as I read it. The article itself is about whether or not you should quit your job to write full time and it really resonated with me. Writing was something that I had always treated as a hobby, something that I used to pass the time. I wasn't giving the it the respect that I think it deserves and that was the main point of the article. It was the final proverbial straw that broke the camel's back for me and I decided it was time. I am extremely lucky to have an incredibly supportive and loving girlfriend who could understand what I wanted to accomplish and was more than happy to help support us through what will be a very trying time. But this is something that I want to do for the rest of my life. I want to be able to be apart of peoples lives like the thousands of books I have read have done for me. So I have taken the leap without a safety net. This post is my first post as a full time writer (soon to be author) and I am terrified. What if not a single person reads this? What if I can never write a successful book? I don't think I have ever been more terrified of something in my life. But, that isn't necessarily a bad thing. It'll give me drive to write. It'll allow to for me to hold myself accountable to write more, to write better. It'll do exactly what I wanted it to do when I first thought about quitting my job to write. It'll let me give writing the respect it deserves, to allow me to able to hopefully do this for the rest of my life.
So, for the people reading this now, thank you! Thank you for allowing me to have a platform to do what I love. Get ready for the future because, as a very talented man once wrote, I am not throwing away my shot!
Comments
Post a Comment