Don’t Let Money Ruin Your Love of Writing
Forget the money, for a moment, and let your words sing life and joy back into your soul.
“Your words flow easily and beautifully,” my sixth-grade teacher said before planting a large, red “A” on the top of my poetry assignment. I reveled in her praise for days, because I’d poured my heart and soul into those poems.
When I was thirteen, I reveled in another milestone. I sold a poem to the “Poet’s Corner” of a magazine and was paid the grand sum of a dollar, which my mother promptly framed.
Spurred by these successes, I bought a notebook and began journaling. I scribbled descriptions, thoughts, emotions, and the minutiae of daily life, and although I sometimes neglected the journal for months, I always picked it up again, pouring my heart onto those blank pages until they were filled with words of anguish, joy, memories and aspirations.
Deciding I wanted to write as a career, I earned a degree in Journalism and began a stint as a newspaper reporter. I was finally being paid a living wage to write! But creativity and love of words deserted me when I had to churn out ten or twelve stories a day, with little time to reread, let alone edit or fine-tune anything. Covering town board meetings, then hunching over a keyboard at midnight to complete an article before deadline has a way of dampening…
