Real Words

When people ask me about how I became a writer, I try to find the most succinct method of describing the wandering path that led to getting paid to write full time. The truth is that I’ve always done writing in one form or another but I also kind of just fell into writing for pay.

I’ve been writing creatively for as long as I can remember. I have saved stories that I wrote in elementary school. I’ve kept journals since I was ten. I have started writing a few different novels over the years (although none are even close to being finished). And I always kind of thought that I’d like to “be a writer” (meaning author books) someday.

But when I actually started getting paid to write, it was because I needed an immediate income and writing is what I do best. I won’t lie; I got into writing by doing academic writing for other people. A lot of writers have an ethical issue with this. As for me, it was just a job. I wrote high school papers, college papers and even a few thesis papers. Students paid me to earn them A’s with my writing. This eventually led into working with so-called paper mills online.

I didn’t particularly like this work and it doesn’t pay that well but it helped lead me into full-time web writing. I learned how to do online writing and how to communicate via content management systems. this improved my resume enough to start getting online jobs writing SEO / keyword articles for various firms.

From there, it was just a matter of beefing up my resume with more and more experience. I started to apply to every writing job I could find because I needed the money. Some of the more interesting writing jobs I took on included:

• Writing horoscopes. I did this for a few different places but the first job was a job writing horoscopes for an Asian fashion magazine that only lasted a few issues before going out of business.
• Doing music reviews. I got to do CD reviews and live music reviews for a number of different online sites and even a print magazine (Skope). I actually didn’t enjoy this job very much although the perks of attending free live music were nice. And I did meet some cool musicians.
• Lots of “adult” writing. You’d be surprised how much money the adult industry pays to writers. I’ve done reviews of online and DVD porn. I’ve been a ghost writer for a porn blog supposed to be written by a young gay porn star. And I’ve written reviews of local strip clubs.

I also did a lot of slightly more legitimate writing including web content and writing articles for various magazines. Oh, and I wrote a couple of books as well.

These days, I make my money off of blogging for businesses. I don’t just write the blog content. I also promote it around the web using all of the social promotion tools available to writers. So I’m now basically working in the business of social media which involves doing some writing as well. It’s just another twist and turn on my writing path.

I’m working on some new writing goals for my future so this path is going to change once again. But I’m happy with where things are at for now. And I like that writing always changes!