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You Are Not an Aspiring Writer
How an editor set me straight
Many years ago in my social media past my profile used to always include a reference to being an aspiring writer. I had written reams of pages in academia, had a few writing contest awards for my short fiction and poetry, and had a couple of unfinished novels. I didn’t consider myself a writer because I wasn’t earning my living from my writing. It was a hobby, and generally a non-paying hobby at that.
Through a social news media site called Newsvine, I met a magazine editor. I had published several pieces on Newsvine and she had read them and commented on many of them. She asked if I had considered writing professionally and I told her I was an aspiring writer but it was a hobby. Writing was something I did in my spare time, not something I made time to do. She told me the first thing I needed to do was to stop calling myself an aspiring writer and accept the fact I’m a writer. She said to start making time to write with publication in mind, not just writing when I had the spare time to do so.
It took a while for me to accept what she told me. I got distracted by social media and the immediate feedback it provided through comments and likes. I was a prolific writer on the now-defunct Google+ service. I posted hundreds of thousands of words of fiction and nonfiction, news and opinion, and fed off the immediate…
