Today’s Wordpress writing prompt asks what alternative career paths you have considered, or are interested in.
I’ve always loved the act of writing. I would never claim to be particularly good at it - passable maybe - but have always loved the act of sitting down and emptying my head into a keyboards, an paper notebook, or whatever the tool or method might be. And therein lies the problem. I’m a serial “tinkerer”.
Rather than settle for a given notebook, or writing app, I’m always trying the next thing out. For years I carried Moleskine notebooks around with me - filling the pages with observations, thoughts, ideas, and doodles. When bullet journals became popular, I read Ryder Carroll’s book, and invested myself in them - “rapid logging” and “migrating” my way from day to day, week to week, and month to month.
Writing on paper has of course been an anachronism of sorts - in parallel with the moleskine notebooks and bullet journals, I’ve been witness to the arrival of smartphones, tablets, and all manner of note taking apps into our lives. The list is long - Evernote, Notion, Obsidian, Bear, Ulysses, Scrivener… name a “second brain” note taking or writing app, and I’ve probably tried it.
But what was all this writing for? The common thread throughout all of the head emptying has always been the blog. My blog. My almost daily expounding of idiot opinions, and inconsequential contemplation.
During the pandemic - while not furloughed like so many colleagues - I happened upon the commercial writing model at Medium, and thought “I could do that” (you know, in addition to everything else, because I’m an idiot like that). For a few months I threw myself at Medium, and wrote no-end of articles about whatever I thought anybody might want to read - and got paid for it.
The money was good, but also hard work, relentless, and utterly unpredictable. The articles I was most proud of earned pennies. One or two badly written afterthoughts went massively viral.
Perhaps the biggest lesson of that time is that most commercial writing is a race to the bottom of a barrel. While writing stories about subjects I cared about, I became increasingly aware of the preponderance of stories about “how to make money at Medium”, or “how to attract readers”. Looking back, it was obvious - those with the largest following were not the best writers - they were the best influencers - and they preyed on the most vulnerable - those that wished to be as popular as them.
They were the cool kids.
Suddenly Seymour Hoffman’s “Lester Bangs” spoke from the depths of my brain;
“they make you feel cool. And hey. I met you. You’re not cool”
“The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you’re uncool.”
I left Medium soon after, and consigned myself to never making money through writing - not if it meant selling out and churning out the same awful sausage machine slop. I wonder what those famous-for-five-minutes writers think of the AI slop machines that write better offal in a fraction of the time? They’re probably using it to help destroy the once wonderful social internet.
I wonder what happens if you ask an AI slop machine to generate an essay about why AI slop generation is so self defeating? Would it become self aware and sink into a Marvin level depression? Perhaps that’s how we defeat AI - we wait for it to become self aware, and realise just how vaccuous and meaningless it’s existence really is.
In more recent times I hosted my blog at Substack too - and watched in mock horror (not really surprised) as it slowly pivoted towards the same idiot capitalist grifting hellscape that Medium had descended into.
Perhaps money really does ruin everything?
I should probably mention that I’ve had several attempts at NaNoWriMo too - the annual writing slog, where people are encouraged to try and write 50,000 words in a month. It starts again next week - it runs during November.
I completed NaNoWriMo a few years ago - I wrote the beginning of my own autobiography - recording memories of growing up, school, first jobs, and so on. I made it to 50,000 words in two weeks. It turns out if you have something to write about, it’s not difficult at all - writing something anybody else might want to read is another matter entirely.
It turns out writing your own autobiography is a wonderful form of self therapy. I wonder if we only really remember the good parts of our own lives - because I still find myself smiling when I read any of it back.
Anyway.
I think I’ve covered “alternative career paths”. It hasn’t been so much an alternative, as much as something I did “as well” - which as I’ve already mentioned, is something I’m particularly adept at. Why spin one plate well, when you can spin many badly? Perhaps that should be the tagline on my blog.
You never know - perhaps one day a wealthy publisher will read my forgettable nonsense, and offer me a huge advance to stop the software development and content creation nonsense, and double down on emptying my head.
We can dream, can’t we?