In Praise of Amateur Writers

We live in a professional world; a world that distinguishes "real" from "amateur." There are professional ballplayers and semi-pro players. Professional astronomers and self-taught stargazers. There are also professional and amateur writers.

Often we redefine the terms: Professional means real; amateur means unsuccessful dreamer. Recently I had to send off yet another short bio of myself. You know the kind that sums up your existence in sixty words or less. I've done a ton of these over the years but over the last four years I've been able to add the line, " . . . is a full time writer . . ." It took a long time to get to this point, and truth is, I have no idea how long I'll be able to use the phrase.

When I write those words, I always feel a sense of pride. I don't know why. I'm not a better writer because I do it full time. My sales are no better because I spend my days linking one word to another. Truth is, many quality authors hold eight to five jobs. Does that make their work any less important or significant? Not at all.

Over the last few weeks I've been reading short stories of science fiction all written by people who hold down day jobs and I've been impressed by the quality of the stories. I've spoken to scores of writers like those and each one sees himself or herself as a writer even though they spend more hours in an office, teaching, at a bank, or driving nails into 2x4s than they do writing.

We do not become writers because we get paid for it. We are writers because we put words on a page. Every "successful" writer was once an amateur. Dean Koontz taught school, as did Stephen King; Jack Cavanaugh was a pastor; Grisham practiced law. On my shelf are books written by airline pilots, ER doctors, insurance brokers (Tom Clancy), housewives, nurses, engineers, and just about every other profession.

Publication has always been my goal, but it's not the only goal. Writing has its own rewards and those rewards are unique to every wordsmith. Fiction writers know what it's like to live in a world of their own creation; nonfiction writers know what it means to communicate information that might otherwise languish in the backwaters of ignorance.

Amateur or professional a writer is one who writes. Period.

Al Gansky

Comments

[KB]

Thanks for those words. They warm the soul.

Also, love the header image. It's peaceful, and I can feel the water on my feet.

[Kathy]

I'll be asking you to sum up your life in another 60 words soon for my conference blog http://flcwc.blogspot.com/.

I was hoping you'd be signing at ICRS but I didn't see you anywhere.

I finished Incumbant and am now reading Before Another Dies (I might not have those quite right but you get the point).

"Talk" to you soon.

[Remote sensing services]

Thanks for sharing.
regards
http://www.sblgis.com/