Being A Writer Versus Having A Writing Job

From the time I was six years old, I knew I was born to be a writer. I wrote a poem back then that I called, “Slick Move.” It was about tortured souls slipping on oil slicks or banana peels. What can I say? I was six.

That’s when I knew I wanted to be a writer. Of course, my writing evolved in great ways and it was interesting to me to learn that not all minds thought like mine. I imagined adventurous stories. I got excited about creating new twists to a tale I was weaving and coming up with an ending no one would ever be able to predict.

When I learned that my friends had no interest in writing, it blew my mind. They loved reading my work but they had no desire to create stories of their own. I didn’t get it. I loved playing basketball and football with them. I loved playing Kick-the-Can and Hide-and-Seek around the neighborhood. We could talk baseball legends all day. Why was it that I was interested in what they liked but they thought about writing the same way I thought about beets? There was no way I was touching them.

It took me years to realize writers are a special breed. That’s when I began to feel unique in a certain way. That’s also when I realized that my friends thought I was a little weird. Into my teenage years I aged thinking I was strange and all along, I didn’t realize I was nurturing that very notion. The more I wrote, the more I kept to myself working on words and trying to master the craft of leading readers through moving plots. But also, I played Hide-and-Seek less with the neighborhood kids who had to finally realize they lost me to a world they didn’t understand.

When the time finally came, I joined the Marines. Then, I put myself through college. I married a beautiful wife. We had a daughter. We got a divorce. That’s the time in my life when I crashed and burned into a dark world where the raw eccentricity in me truly began to shine.

Throughout all of those experiences, my voice was forming. Not the young voice of “Slick Move,” but the mature voice of shocking reality and heartbreak. It was my beginning and the greatest benefit to all of it was that I would no longer encounter writer’s block. I had more than enough to say. The thoughts poured over like a waterfall that never runs dry.

If I had to guess, I could easily say I’ve written about a million words. Most of them have been for clients who have come to me needing a Freelance Writer. But I managed to pen a few stories of my own in all that time. The heartwarming drama about a single father who is separated from his daughter by a near-death experience is a novel I called A River in the Ocean. It has fans who have requested more stories about the little girl known as Krista Ferlin.

A psychological thriller that is similarly about a single father who fights to save his daughter from human trafficking was recently published under the title The Deeper Dark. It also has fans who have passionately requested that I follow up with a revenge story. Of course, I had that in mind but I would spoil the ending of The Deeper Dark if I were to go into detail about that at this time.

What I can say is that both A River in the Ocean and The Deeper Dark have built-in fans who would gladly pay a membership if I were to trickle out chapters to them one at a time. In addition to that, A River in the Ocean is also a screenplay and The Deeper Dark is soon to become one. I am constantly looking for a producer and I know one day, these stories will make it to the big screen. When that occurs, more members will flock to my site for new material that I will always be able to produce from my copious notes and lifetime of diverse experiences.

My members would not only enjoy the dark stories of psychological thrillers or the heartwarming tales I concoct into dramas, but they will also laugh hysterically at the comedies I have penned. My varied range of genres will invite members from all walks of life and they will keep coming because writing is what I do. It’s what I wake up every morning looking forward to doing.

I once worked at a marketing firm that serviced celebrities. On the floor were three different types of employees. Content curators, writers, and editors made up the bulk of the company. I was one of the writers who worked my way up from the new guy to a team leader and finally to having several accounts of mine with nine writers under me.

I am the one who made the observation that our company either had people with writing jobs or writers. I wanted writers. People who thought of themselves as having a writing job were more than welcome to work for a different team leader and do half the job for the same paycheck over there.

My team loved me because I not only wrote with them after becoming their supervisor but I also taught them as much as I could when I found the time. They might not have had a college education like me or had the writing experiences I did, but they loved writing and that’s all that mattered to me. As long as they were willing to learn, I was willing to teach.

I’m not a guy who gets up every day with a writing job. I’m the guy who gets up every day with the desire to write and I can’t wait to get everything else done so that I can finally get down to it. My members will know the difference and they’ll sign up for the long haul.