Hope

I grew up as the son of an attorney. I don't know exactly what that did to me, but one thing I knew for sure as I came out of high school was this: Love doesn't pay the bills.

Romanticism of any sort requires some sort of belief or hope that there are good things out there. I'm a romantic if ever there was one. So my father, though he never discouraged me (quite the opposite in fact), just by who he was led me to believe that real jobs were the kind that had letters after them. M.D., P.H.D., J.A.G., Etc.

Perhaps it was less my father's job, and more the mix of personality I got from my mother and father, my birth order, my upbringing, or something else. But even though I loved, LOVED, theatre and good stories, I never thought of writing as a real job.

Drama, acting, art, dancing, painting, writing, singing, these were all nice things, but they weren't real jobs.

I had no hope. I never even considered writing in any form as a job. My plan was to become extremely wealthy as a doctor and then write a great screenplay on the side. Because that's how I viewed the craft. Something that anyone could do...as a hobby.

It wasn't until I flunked out of biology, chemistry, and statistics, that I decided to look somewhere else. I fell in with a community theatre performing Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. I was immediately hooked again. I wrote a play and it was performed. I changed my major to Theatre and amazing things started to happen. But I was still shackled with my doubt. Art isn't a real job.

There's plenty to support that idea. Countless artists, writers, actors, etc. never make a dime. They put all of their hope in and get a big kick in the face for bearing their soul.

I hedged my bets. I studied theatre with a teaching degree. I still couldn't accept that my passion could be anything but wild oats. A phase.

Then I took a class on writing. A professor named James Arrington taught the course. I studied the craft of writing and I loved it. In that short semester I had a glimpse of writing as a real thing. An endeavor worth pursuing.

But I still hang back. It is now nearly a decade later and I have hundreds of doubts. Is writing a real job? Can I make enough money to support my family? Can I write anything worth reading?

The truth is that the answer is, "YES!" But it's not an easy answer to swallow. Writing takes time. Hours and hours of work that never sees the light of day. Hope is in short supply.

If I could go back and tell my 16 year old self one thing it would be this, "Writing is a real job, and you can do it. Don't be afraid to turn your focus onto something artistic. Don't worry about what other people think, keep working, keep writing, keep drawing. These are skills that will pay off. It will take time, but they will pay off."

If I have any influence upon you as a writer, I want to say this. Keep going. There is a world of published, successful writers, and if you keep working you can be a part of it.

Keep writing. Keep believing. You'll get there. I'll see you when you do.