Writing Isn’t Always About What Gets Our Interest

Yzabel / September 27, 2005

When I was younger, my dream was “to become a writer” (or should I use the word “author” here, since I was thinking of novels and of nothing else). To be honest, this is still my dream, and this is the reason why, after all these years, I’m still pumped up about writing. I’m a very cyclic person who jumps from one interest to the other in a matter of weeks, months or of 2-3 years at the most, but writing has never left me. Even when I’d spent time playing MMORPGs and tabletop RPGs, half of my interest in these was that I could write the adventures of our characters afterwards, or make up “parallel” or “intermediary” stories. I still have boatloads of these. It was still writing.Then came the turn of technical writing in my life, that I didn’t recognize as such at first—after all, it was meant to be temporary, and it was combined with loads of pagination works as well, not “only writing”. This however made me realize one thing: I was able to write on themes that didn’t interest me. At all. And I did it, because it was my job, period. I still do it as of now. In fact, in the past months, I even came to write on a few blogs, including some in the Niner Niner network, for the sake of blogging at first. It’s been an interesting ride, and more than once I took part in blogs in which I didn’t have any interest at first, simply because I thought I could, and had specific articles under the hand that I thought would fit well there.My most recent venture as of now is on The News Blog. It came as a bit of a surprise: I had applied for another blog, but the network’s owner thought I’d be an interesting add-on to the news-related one, to bring a more European point of view to it. I took up the challenge, and it has proved very interesting so far. As a nice side-effect, this sort of forces me to take a closer interest to the news, which is good for my own culture.In brief, I was glad to realize that I’m able to write on different topics, and not necessarily the ones I want. It’s like I’ve evolved in the past years from a “childish, do-what-I-want” conception of writing to something more… professional, perhaps?blogging, writing

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Comments

  • Jennifer

    Writing isn’t always about writing what we like. Oh what a statement. That’s one thing I love about my writing. It’s always about what I want because it isn’t my career. I spend 50+ hours a week drawing and when I sit down to write it’s purely for me. It’s awesome and I know not the norm.I’ve never yet had to writing about something I didn’t like, but I’m sure the day will come when I have to sit down and write something that’s isn’t what I want to write about. Until that day comes I’m enjoying my freedom :)I do like your point though. There are certain type buildings I don’t like designing or working on but I still do them. (to give teh architecture spin). I think that aspect of ‘it’s not always what you want’ can apply to most jobs.I think it’s part of what makes us good writers though…being able to learn to do something and do it well even when it’s not out ‘topic of choice’.

  • Pat Kirby

    I never wrote fiction until a couple years ago. But I’ve always enjoyed the process of writing, even when the topic–computer documentation, dissertations, etc.–wasn’t interesting.I believe that being a technical writer prepared me for fiction by strengthening my ability to present ideas with clarity to a variety of audiences. Ugh. Though you wouldn’t know it from that sentence.

  • Yzabel

    Jennifer, exactly. The good thing is that even after a day spent doing technical writing, I still enjoy my fiction writing, so I suppose it’s all good and I don’t have anything to complain about! 🙂 In fact, the more I look at it, the more I think that I can be good at writing a lot of things, provided they’re diversified enough. The fact that I have tech. docs, blog posts about varied matters and my novel to write, make me able to fully do it. If I only had one thing to write about, I’d probably be bored quickly.

  • Yzabel

    Pat, that’s a side-effect I’ve noticed, too. There’s no way to squeeze purple prose and bad writers’ hacks into technical writing, so once this skill was acquired, suddenly Iwasn’t tempted anymore to resort to these tricks. Alright, it did also made me completely rusty regarding prose, but… it has its good sides, too.

  • Deborah

    I had a short stint with ghostwriting, which involved writing a prep guide for the MCAT for premed students. It was quite a challenge, as not everything was laid out for me. I think it’s good to write about things outside your norm because it flexes your mental muscles.

  • Elvira Black

    I spent many a year copyediting and writing as my day job–pimping/advertising for a non-profit. At first I saw it as a kind of punishment–since I’d been an account rep for a number of years and did not relish writing propaganda. This kind of one-dimensional, rah rah writing by day–and freelancing about things I loved at “night”–became too much after awhile. You’re using the same part of your brain all the time. But I suppose it was useful to know I could be versatile–and it sure helped pay the bills!

  • Yzabel

    Indeed, Elvira, paying the bills is often a good enough source of motivation… 😉

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