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Playing at Being a Writer
It’s a game we all have to play as we walk these creative paths.
As someone who’s been writing since high school, it’s still hard to justify my “hobby” (because that’s what it is, whether I like it or not) to the people around me — especially those who just want me to settle down with a good job that will provide a pension for retirement. Once, I had high aspirations to be a novelist — even the word sounds important — but as the years pass by, I’m becoming disenchanted. It seems that books themselves aren’t selling how they once did either. I guess the allure of Netflix is just too strong.
But, as I’m typing away and pulling at the threads of my ideas, sometimes I have this flash of unease: am I wasting my life by doing this? I’m not making any money at this, so is it not important after all?
Let me start by saying I’ve made less than two thousand dollars from my writing over the past five years. I won a few contests through the college I attended, but it was a small pond and the creative writing department wasn’t exactly lucrative. And then this year I found both Medium and Vocal Media. Over the past four months, I’ve made less than two hundred dollars between both sites. If I were back in Stephen King’s era, that might be some cash to work with, but in 2021? Not gonna happen.
