The Power Of Finding & Following Your Passion

A lot of people, especially my wife, think of me as a bit of a spoiled brat. And you know what… I can’t really argue with that.
I have, for the totality of my adult life, been actively engaged in writing, not to the exclusion of everything else, but pretty close.
This all started when I was about 19. I wrote a goodbye letter to Sandy Sparks in North Tonawanda New York after I had moved to Ottawa.
It wasn’t the letter itself, which was simply an honest confession that I didn’t think our long distance relationship would work out, it was really about the act of crafting the words in such a way to tell a lovely girl how much I loved her, but had to let her go.
I had never really written much of anything before that outside of a kind of dopey poem for my high school yearbook.
But this letter was the first thing I ever wrote that was powered by passion, and I could feel that. The act of digging deep into my heart and letting the words flow from there was a rush like I had never experienced up to that point.
And the fact that I was creating it purely out of my thoughts and when my stepmother, Dianna, read it before I mailed it to Sandy and it made her cry, provided the realization that writing was to become my drug of choice for the basically the rest of my life.
Sandy took it well and we wrote back and forth for a few months. Her last letter what to tell me that she has met a new guy and that we would always be friends etc. But that was that.
When you’re young, girls and friends come and go in your life with astounding frequency, and you go from feeling full of love to emptied out.
But if you’re a young writer, you find yourself instinctively making use of both of those conditions. Because for you they are simply two sides of the same coin called inspiration.

Writing As A Career

This wasn’t all that difficult for me. In typical fashion I wrote myself into it at a little hole-in-the-wall agency where the creative director and the other writer there gave me a crash course in how advertising worked, and this equipped me admirably for a 20 year career that spanned 6 different agencies and just about every type of communication writing you could do.
On the side, in addition to lyrics and poetry, I became interested in screenwriting and produced about 20 feature and series treatments, a dozen fully realized screenplays and a badly constructed novel (never again).

Along Came Blogging

Once I had the screenwriting thing more or less figured out and realized I didn’t want to touch that business with a 10 foot pole (too many crazies), I decided to start writing a review column.
I called it the Couch Potato Chronicles, and besides all the advertising work I was doing, it became my principal writing passion and is to this day, close to 20 years later, although it’s really no longer called The Couch Potato Chronicles. In fact it’s not really called anything except blogging.

My Advice, Because There Should Always Be Some

A lot of people have asked me how I managed to publish something every day. It’s a hard one to answer because I never really think about it…it’s just part of the way things happen around here.
If you are a real writer, writing is an addiction of sorts that is fed by your passions. It’s not so much something you do, but more a part of who you are.
Every morning, (weekends included, because we never close), I make a coffee and some toast and sit down at the computer and whatever has been bouncing around in my head seeps out in some form or other.
For example, this post was originally going to be based on the idea of wishing that you were someone else. I came up with the idea late last night, and thought about it a lot. But my problem is that though I know a lot of people who would actually want to be someone else, I never really have.
Despite my tics and slight case of cynicism, I really like being me. I like the life I have made with my wife. I love my family and I like the freedom that all the choices I have made in my life have given me, and I like the fact that my wife is smart and shrewd in the financial area and has enabled all the time that I use to write.
So there was really nothing to expound on. It’s a great life. But it’s a writer’s life and everybody around me knows and respects that.
So my advice to aspiring writers or part time writers who want to become full time writers is very simple.
Do whatever you have to do to make it a part of your life. If it doesn’t fit, well then you can enjoy it as a pastime, and something to do while you are searching for whatever your destiny might be.
And trust me when I tell you that you will know it when you find it. And when you do, you’ll be in the same place as me, living on your own terms, doing what makes you happy, and adding to the good stuff out there.

Post Script

The world has taken a sharp turn into regression these days. The people who are going to help pull it out are those who are driven to correct the course. I like to think I am one of them and I hope you are too.
So if you are a writer, write with as much passion as you can muster. If you are something else, put your heart into it and make your work a positive contribution to things.
This is how the world moves forward, when people, no matter what they do, try hard to be an example of doing things right.
We need it more than ever these days. So get to work.

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