So... I write. This was a fine thing
when I was six, and sent my first-grade teacher skipping into the next classroom
with my composition book to show her fellow teacher my phonetic
precociousness. Somehow by six I had figured out that “tion” was “shun,”
but hadn’t gotten the hang of “qu,” so in a composition about a field trip, I
had written that we children had asked "kwestions."
It was nice when I was 10 or 11 and
wrote poems for my summer camp session booklet (I remember my grandmother being
particularly encouraging) or a few years later when a friend and I serialized
stories on a homeroom blackboard, or my senior year in high school when I wrote
a lot of the parodies for senior sing.
That's where I peaked. That's where
somebody should have put a lid on the simmering ego stew. Someone (me, I
guess) should have insisted I pursue a more definable and profitable
occupation. Instead...I vaguely intended to turn this ability to string words
together into a livelihood.
That didn’t work out too quickly
after college. A strange ethnic weekly here, a mostly administrative spot in a PR firm there, where a press release parody made a hit with the client... I eventually noticed that on any given Sunday you could
wallpaper a two-car garage with the NY Times' programmer classifieds. Longing for a seller’s market, this led me to
take two Cobol courses at night at NYU and a five-year detour programming for
banks and other companies, back in the days of mainframes. My friends at these
workplaces tended to be former social workers or rehabilitated language majors.
When I returned to writing I traded
on my programming years, convincing employers that I had amassed the technical fluency
to edit and write for user manuals and computer publications. By staying on the
technical side I made more money than a generic reporter or your classic dreamer sort of fiction writer, but
far less than programmers of the time. (Of course, truly gifted dreamer writers
can and have spectacularly outearned programmers, but that’s extremely rare.)
Per pure kilowatt of mental energy,
few things pay worse than writing. For every lawyer suppressing his or
her inner scribe, there must be at least an equal number of writers wishing mom
or dad had pushed law school harder. Or plumbing. Or auto
mechanics.
The rise of the Internet, where
writers outnumber readers, has made a bad situation much worse, as anyone
who's been following the media knows.
The whole raison d’etre of trade pubs, in which an editorial staff
brought new products and trends to the attention of marketplace readers, was
pretty much destroyed with the advent of the search engine.
The slow death of true journalism,
let alone trade journalism, is a well-worn rant. To have been cut loose from an
editorial spot after fifty is another all-too common and unhappy story. The years since then… and there’s been a good
handful of those… have included a few fat years writing for technical PR firms
and companies, followed by years that take far too much pumping to keep up workflow.
The “content marketing” drumbeat -- Do
you hear it? -- is the sound of those PR firms and their ex-staff, now contract writers trying to hang new
shingles in a marketplace in which every company can be its own publisher. The old trade media
intermediary has been forced to stop pretending to be written for readers, and
today baldly advertises itself as simply a marketing vehicle.
“Custom publishing” tries to look and
smell like independent research and reporting, while being produced and
directed by the companies that once bought advertising; ads that were clearly
identifiable as such. Ads that once supported whole floors of editors, writers
and graphic artists now let loose upon the freelance marketplace, thick on the ground, working from home, or gone to
greener pastures.
The point of all this
kvetching? Mostly it’s for kvetching’s
sake. By if you’ve come this far, let me just offer this tool in your efforts
to dissuade your children from thinking of becoming “writers.” And with that, the only good news and
consolation: Some amazingly bad writing is perpetrated by some astonishingly
well-paid and highly placed people. If
you can add writing ability to the kinds of practical educations they had the
good sense to get, you will probably get to exercise those writing muscles and
enjoy a better standard of living while designing circuits/reading x-rays/
selling insurance/ fixing cars.
