I Used to Be a Writer
Then I forgot to do the work
Here is the bottom line upfront: two of the biggest mistakes you can make as a writer are chasing a result instead of loving the process and failing to develop a deep relationship with your subject.
This is a tale of how I got gobsmacked for achieving both of those fails.
“Congratulations! You are officially an Emmy winner!”
I’ve gotten so many scam-laden emails in my adult life, I could honestly write a compelling book on my top 500 favorites. So when I received one with those words in the subject line, I nearly deleted it without even opening it.
Then I noticed who it was from. The sender was a person well known to me, but I was still confused because I hadn’t seen or talked to them in nearly four years. How would they know that I’ve won an….wait. An Emmy?! This had to be a joke, because I have never knowingly written anything that would’ve been featured on television.
After much debate and a quickly-hatched plan to reformat my computer and change all my account passwords if this turned out to be some kind of phishing scam, I clicked on the email. Turns out, this was no joke.
I did some feature writing on compelling people for a particular organization in 2009 and when I returned home, I forgot all about it. Apparently, they used many of the features I wrote as part of a script for a documentary that aired three years later. The documentary won a regional Emmy Award and the organization named me as a principle contributor.
“That’s it!” I decided. “I know what I’m going to do with the rest of my life now!” I meant it, too — right up until reality hit.
I began writing until my fingers bled — all while maintaining my day job. And thank God I did, too. I submitted to newspapers, magazines, online publications…anyone I could think of that would surely want the clout boost of featuring a major award winner.
They all said no. Well, not all of them — just the ones that bothered to respond to my submissions at all.
I had this shiny, gold, surprisingly heavy statue on my mantle. No one cared. Discouraged, I vowed to never write again. Cue mistake number two.
The Walking Dead on AMC aired their season 7 premiere October 23, 2016. It was the goriest episode of any television show I had ever seen — even by TWD’s standards. Glenn Rhee, an original character from the show’s series premiere, shockingly died at the hands of Negan, the series’ villain-of-the-month at that time.
The next morning, I sat in my office sipping coffee and still trying to shake off the unsettling gore from the previous night’s episode. A friend, who happened to be managing editor of my hometown newspaper, posted on social media that she needed to arrange that day’s obituaries but could not bring herself to do so. She joked that Glenn should have one of his own.
Just for a laugh, I opened a blank document on my computer and whipped one out. I used some real-life circumstances of actor Steven Yeun’s real life and ascribed them to his character to fill in some gaps. Within ten minutes, I had what I thought was a professional looking obituary with some humor stitched in, and I sent it to her.
Thinking she would read it, maybe laugh, and move on with her day, I decided to move on with mine.
The next morning, she sent me a screenshot of the previous day’s afternoon edition. She published the fake obituary. I called her and we had a laugh about how no one outside of her roughly 2500-person circulation would ever see this. We were….OH-SO-WRONG.
That screenshot somehow made it onto social media, and off it went. Within three days, it had more than 80 million social media impressions across a multitude of platforms.
Fox News covered it. MSNBC. CNN. Us Weekly. Time Magazine Online. The Sun in the U.K. Sean Hannity featured it on his website. This tiny local paper in north central Arkansas got flooded with requests for original prints of the paper from six continents.
The Associated Press awarded us first place in the 2017 Media Editors Award nontraditional news category for small market newspapers for this ridiculous piece.
Once again, I was determined to be a world-famous writer. I cranked up my prodigious submission machine again, and this time I got — nowhere. Again.
Remember that bottom line upfront? I made both of those mistakes in subsequent efforts at writing after each of these watershed moments in my writing career.
The National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences and the Associated Press are heavy hitters in media, to be sure. The problem is, you can’t eat statues and plaques, and you can’t wave them at the grocery store and leave with free food. Those awards were results, not craft.
They came so easily that I figured all I ever had to do was whip out some cleverish-sounding mass of words and people would always fall all over themselves effusively praising me and elevating me to godlike status in the industry. All I had to do was throw those bad boys in my bio on every submission and anyone would be lucky to publish my stuff.
I figured I didn’t have to earn it anymore. I figured others had to earn me.
I chased the result instead of putting in the work. And I failed.
I also didn’t love my subjects. I demanded that they love me. I demanded that anything I write about should be meaningful to me rather than something others would enjoy reading.
I don’t believe you can sustain a successful writing career without passion; I also believe readers are smart enough to know when you’re phoning it in.
Writing is an art and a craft. As with any true art form, it will find its audience if it is honored as such by someone truly gifted in that discipline — but only if they are disciplined enough to do the work.
