Heya!
In one of my previous posts I wondered about travel journalism (after musing about the abundance of international experiences nowadays), which is a very sought-after job, though it can't be as easy as it seems. And it's definitely not easy to get, because how many writers (and even people who aren't even interested in that) would refuse a paid-for trip to another part of the world? Not many, I suppose. Take a look, Elizabeth Gilbert wrote a book based on a whole year of traveling around the world, which her publisher was willing to pay for her in advance. Now that publisher is probably counting up the big bucks from the sales of the book, but there's something almost fairy-tale like about this story, as the sceptical ones among us will point out, as it's not so easy for most people to just take off exploring the world for a year. But hey, I read the book, it made for some good entertainment one way or the other.
Myself, I first started writing my silly little childhood stories when I was about 8. Obviously, at that age I did not yet think much of it, but till this day my mum sometimes fondly recollects how I used to sit at the table when I was a child and just write, write, write. By the time I was 12 I already had a pretty good idea that one day I would like to be a published writer. And perhaps all those pages (I mean it, it's quite a lot actually haha, I even had characters and a storyline) I filled with my Russian scribbles may not get published in their original form, I really feel like they have become a part of me during those years. I grew up with the story and the story grew up with me, and as I often tend to go by the writer's rule of 'write what you know', I based much of the underlying ideas in the story on my own experiences. And what do you expect, I was what, 10? The funniest thing is, I actually re-wrote the beginning of the story a few times, because as with every passing year I became more mature, the previous beginning I wrote just seemed so childish to me. I wonder what I would think of it if I read it now... it has been years since I've been busy with that story. And at some point, during high-school in the Netherlands, I also made the switch from writing in Russian to writing in English. Now that's probably something that not many writers actually do, but that's how it is. It's like what they refer to in music as 'cross-over' (although I'm not a big fan of that concept in the way it gets used to describe music artists).
Though they are tucked away safely in the pages of my multi-coloured notebooks, somewhere in my room, you can't say that the characters I created in my childhood (these were not imaginary friends I created out of loneliness by the way, just to make this point clear hahaha) will never experience the joy of being published and decorating the shelves of bookstores. Sure, I grew up and so did they, but who's to say they can't feature in another novel again? Those are gonna be some spunky young ladies. Hahaha.
Why all this reminiscinesce, you might ask. Actually I didn't even mean to write about my childhood writing activities, what I wanted to point out was that since my teenage years when I was already sure that someday I'd like to be a published writer and possibly journalist, too, I've been trying to figure out what aspects of writing and journalism interest me the most. Thanks to my university background, I've written academic and research papers on everything from pshychoanalyzing a famous movie character to the role of testosterone in male spacial cognitioning abilities (hmm, or something like that..), to Disney's Americanization of European fairytales. Diverse? Sure is. But so is journalism, and even after writing for a variety of school and university publications, volunteering my time and efforts to be a 'Society and Culture' newspaper editor, and courses in creative writing and journalism, I still haven't quite figured out what writing path would be the best for me, especially as an international in the Netherlands, with English as the principal language in which I write.
The case is similar for my reading interests, too. One minute I'm reading about the latest news (inevitably, often about something unpleasant), sometime later I'm looking through the articles in a women's magazine giving me advice on how to better lead my life, before I go to bed I read a novel, and in between there somewhere I might also get through a travel article, not without some jealousy, I might add. Having just a touch of nerdness in me, I've devoured many different books in my life, including those for university, with piles of published musings and research on both the US and Disney proudly taking up their space on my bookshelves. And just yesterday I thought, but what happened to all that psychology I studied at University College? I don't (consciously) use what I learned from it nowadays, but perhaps it's because I forgot much of it? So I may be fishing out those big textbooks sometime to find out what it is I've actually learnt about it, and how might I be able to use that knowledge. It can't just be me though who thinks, I learned all that and wrote all those essays, hmmmm.
Well, as the here and now goes, I'm still figuring out where my writing interests are exactly, although you might just say it's in 'diversity' (as you can probably tell from this post itself!). Whether it's in journalism and news, travel-writing, producing 'diverse' articles for various publications on an array of topics (as has mostly been the case till now), book-publishing (hopefully) or communications for non-profit organizations (also hopefully), I'm going to keep on trying to get there. By 'there' you may interpret what you wish at the moment, I've given much here for your imagination to go in all kinds of directions ;) And as part of it all, well, there's the blog you're reading. Thanks!
Beijo!
No comments:
Post a Comment