My Ambitions as a Writer and That Time I went sorta Viral-ish (Part 1 of 2)

The first thing I ever remember trying to write for fun was a sports almanac. You know, those thousands of pages-thick books with the stats and stories from the world of sports, that have since been replaced by the internet. Yeah, one of those sports almanacs. That was the first thing I tried to write for fun. I was eight.

It was quite ambitious of me to think that an eight year-old armed with nothing but a memory and a typewriter could somehow pull off thousands of pages of copy about the year that was 1988 in sports.

I got one page done. It was a recap off the top of my head of Notre Dame’s run to the college football national championship. Do you remember that team? Tony Rice and “The Rocket” Raghib Ismail led the Fightin’ Irish to an unbeaten season. I remember watching a lot of those games that year. And I really wanted to write about them right after they won the title. So they were page one of one-page my sports almanac.

So I didn’t do what I originally set out to do, write a thousand page almanac about 1988 sports, because well, I was eight. I did feel like I accomplished something. And I did want to keep on writing and writing and writing.

My first dream job was a baseball player, but my backup plan was to write about sports if I wasn’t good enough to go pro. That was responsible of me to have back up plan as a kid.

My parents fully supported this dream. I remember my father signing me up for a creative writing day camp when I was around 9 or 10. And I remember how sad I felt when we came home one day just a few weeks before that camp was supposed to start and there was a message on the answering machine informing us that they had to cancel the camp due to a lack of interest. It was a real bummer.

I kept on writing and kept on loving writing all throughout grammar school and into the early years of high school. In my junior year of high school I took journalism class as an elective. I took it along with mostly seniors and ended the year with the highest grade in the class. There were only about 20 of us in the class, but still. And I did get the “journalism pin” at the end of the year for this accomplishment, so that’s something.

I’m crushing it in journalism class, I love writing, I’m on my way to going to college and majoring in journalism, right? I had my heart set on Syracuse. Originally that had nothing to do with their renowned journalism programs, it was because Sherman Douglas was my favorite college basketball player and the orange uniforms were pretty awesome. Then I learned that not only did they have sweet jerseys and a good basketball team, but they also were really well respected in the thing I wanted to do when I grew up. So, win-win, right?

And then the beginning of senior year, something happened. A teacher I respected and our guidance counselor both uttered the same exact phrase to me, “You do know that writers don’t make any money, right?”

I did not know that. But I nodded along.

My dreams were crushed.

I didn’t really have much of plan B and it was already senior year. I could’ve just ignored them but these are teachers and a guidance counselor, they know stuff. I thought.

But they also weren’t exactly raking in the dough either. They were working at a Catholic high school. Why didn’t I question or challenge them as they dropped this truth bomb on my ambitions as a writer? (Oh, and in case you’re curious, the phrase “ambitions as a writer,” is absolutely a 2 Pac reference.)

My Plan B was the even more ambitious idea that I could become a music mogul — the next Diddy, or The Rza, or at the very least, the next Steve Rifkind. Despite having only one, long and not very good year in third grade of saxophone lessons in an extracurricular “band class,” I decided to be a music industry major in college.

I applied and got into Syracuse but we never even went to visit. I was over my orange crush, basically the day I heard the teacher and guidance counselor tell me not to pursue journalism as a career. As I’ve already written about in the blog, I fell in love with Northeastern the moment I walked on to that campus and fortunately for me, they also had a music industry major.

After about a year and a half of struggling with the music portion of the music industry curriculum I decided to change majors. I switched to an English major with a concentration in Creative Writing, which really just meant I took a couple creative writing classes.

Writing papers was cool and all, but I still had that itch to write about sports and music. It was right around this point, my junior year of college that I had been introduced to writing of Bill Simmons (we covered Bill a bit in Part 3 of the Los Angeles trilogy). Reading Bill’s work made me wish I didn’t listen to the adults back in high school. This is what I wish I was doing. But it already felt like it was too late for me, and I starting to run out of hope for my writing career at age 20.

But there actually was a bit of hope, though. Hope in the form a flier I came across on campus in the summer of 2001. A new music magazine covering all genres was looking for writers to do interviews and review shows. Yes! Sign me up!

I responded to the ad and was almost immediately given an assignment. The editor/founder had lined up an interview for me with Lord Have Mercy, a former member of Busta Rhymes’ Flipmode Squad. (If you’re unfamiliar with Lord Have Mercy’s work, check this out.)

I had no idea what I was doing. I’d much millions of interviews in my life but never actually conducted one. I went to the library and took out some books on interviewing. I turned to Yahoo or Alta Vista or whatever search engine we were using in 2001, and looked for some tips online. I had my index cards and my notepad, and prepared to talk to a rapper who was ready to tell the world (or the dozens of Bostonians who would pick up a free copy of this startup, black and white, music magazine that was available in pizza shops and record stores near campus) about his beef with Busta Rhymes.

We talked for about an hour, which I now know was way too long for a 750-word piece. My first piece was submitted and a few weeks later published. I have no idea if Lord Have Mercy ever read it or got to see it at all. I just know that it felt really good to see my name on that page. And I’d see my name every month or so for a while. I was able to balance school with writing, but honestly, I cared a lot more about writing about less-than-household name rappers than I did about writing about Ernest Hemingway or James Joyce. Sorry!

I previously mentioned the co-op program at Northeastern in my blog post about college, and along with the co-op program came an advisor who helped students find internships. Going into my senior year, I told my co-op advisor about the writing I had been doing at the music magazine and asked if it might be possible to land an internship with a magazine. And so she sent me to the journalism program’s co-op coordinator.

Well, I was clearly wasting that co-op coordinator’s time. She took a three-second look at the clips from the music magazine I brought in and said, “No. I can’t send you out on interviews with this level of work, sorry.”

Dreams crushed, again.

But I kept on writing. And not too long after having my dreams crushed for the second time, I’d learn about something called blogging that would change everything.

We’ll cover that in Part 2 of My Ambitions as a Writer and That Time I went sorta Viral-ish.

Tim Hammill is a communications professional in the nonprofit sector. He’s turning 40 on October 20, 2020. He’s writing about the final stretch to this milestone age in 40 Days to 40, a collection of stories, thoughts, reflections and whatever else comes to mind each day. In addition to writing a blog, Tim has also decided to donate his birthday to This Is My Brave, an organization he very recently learned about that brings stories of mental illness and addiction out of the shadows and into the spotlight. If you’d like to support Tim’s birthday fundraiser, go here.

Additionally, there are three other organizations that are close to Tim’s heart: Save the Children, Stand Up To Cancer and the Bridgeport YMCA. Click on each to learn more and to support their work.