I write because I have to. This might sound callous or negative, but it’s a simple truth. I was not blessed with the ability to draw or sing. My expression comes from writing.
When I go for a run and see the sun setting on the faces of statues, I automatically start writing a poem in my head. When I’m in the shower and have been laboring over a headline, I am immediately struck with genius. (Which I will forget as soon as the rinse cycle hits.) Writing is my default. It’s where I feel the most confident. It is my best form of communication. And thankfully, it is my job.
Writing wasn’t always going to be my career. I originally thought I wanted to be an astrophysicist (Can you imagine how proud my parents would be? Ha, whoops.) Then, in high school, in an attempt to avoid a teacher who hated me, I took my senior English at a local college. We wrote about Nirvana songs and the movie Mulan Rouge. We wrote about things I liked and cared about, instead of picking through Hamlet for the 12th time. I learned that you can write about anything and it can be fun. Also around that time, I watched the move Almost Famous and realized I wanted to grow up to be William Miller. These two events pushed me to be an English major at college. My father’s insistence that I not be poor caused me to take on a marketing minor. In my junior year, in David Allen’s marketing class, I met Brendan Quinn – then copywriter at 160over90. This man taught me that not only can I write about things I like and care about, but I can also get paid for it. I was sold.
Most days, I’m proud to call myself a writer. Or, as my cynical friends love to remind me, I’m a copywriter. Either way, I’m lucky.
-AM
Hmm… what a question. Why do I write? Come to think of it, I guess I really don’t know why I write. Maybe it’s because math always bored me in school. Maybe it’s because I hate blood too much to study medicine. Maybe it’s because I’d rather have a smoke and shoot a water buffalo with Ernest Hemingway than chat with Albert Einstein about relativity and hair care products any day. I suppose those are all decent reasons, but I’m sure it has to go deeper than that.
Neither of my parents worked jobs that they liked. Growing up and seeing the two of them come home absolutely exhausted from jobs that they, to be perfectly honest, despised left a pretty big impact on me as a wee lad, maybe a bigger impact than I realized at the time. The fear of an Office Space-esque existence filled with TPS reports, missing staplers, sterile fluorescent lighting, and Bill Lumbergh sleeping with my girlfriend more or less made my mind up for me.
I could have studied accounting in college. I could have been a business major. Heck, maybe I could have even studied finance and made a boatload of cash after graduating (side note: I left news for a little over a year and a half to pursue a career in finance. Needless to say, it didn’t stick). Long story short, eh. Doing what everybody else did just because everybody else did it never had much appeal to me. Why not take a chance and to do something interesting, original, or unique? Cubicle work will always be available… take a shot at something great!
In the end it boils down to this; I love reading, I love learning, and I love writing. What better field is there to be in than news? I get paid to learn something new every day and witness history as it happens. If it doesn’t work out then fine, at least I gave it a go and hopefully had a lot of fun along the way… but let’s hope it doesn’t get to that. I REALLY hate math, and Bill Lumburgh was SUCH a dick.
-DV
Pain in the Draft 