Some guy whose head fell off, 19th century
After I was unceremoniously dumped from my job in oil and gas last November, I embarked on a writing career. I'd been told by many that my writing skills are pretty good, but I never really thought it was possible for me to parley it into an actual career (I'm not sure if there's an equivalent to "starving artist" for writers, but that's what I figured 99% of the world's writers ended up being). However, in the course of my search for a meaningful career, I discovered this path called copywriting. This post and blog are not about that, but the short and sweet of it is that it's possible to make a career at writing commercially, especially now that the Internet has taken over the world. I haven't experienced anything more than a taste of financial success while doing it, and that only recently, but it is who and what I am now, or at least the part of me I get to say after telling strangers my name.
One aspect of my working as a professional writer is that it flexes the creativity muscle quite a bit more than my work in oil and gas. It's not that my work in the petroleum field was easy -- there were plenty of mentally-taxing episodes interspersed with the paper shuffling inherent in the particular jobs I was doing. But that's not creativity, at least not in the way that enlivens my gray matter. The creativity my mind thirsts for is apparently this kind, the kind involving putting words on paper in pleasing combinations. That generated my creative spark, but more even than that is it tapped into a deeper reservoir of thinking. The spark set off a bonfire of thought that burns out of control in my head. The creativity muscle atrophies when neglected, but strengthens when flexed, and I've unknowingly been working out at Gold's Gym every day for hours a day.
The problem I run into now is that I can't turn off the creativity. That's where this blog comes in. Maybe it will be like a mental warm-down lap. We'll see what happens, I guess.
