In the Badlands

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I can’t imagine a more time-consuming, thankless gambit in The Arts than The Writer, especially The Writer That Never Makes It. Sometimes I wish Muse never found me in that way, like most I wish the chance encounter was a more bankable one. It was, once upon a time, the writer’s bread and butter was made via niche magazines and freelancing columns, for some reason a bad assumption formed somewhere….

The damaging assumption of writers is that journalism is your way in, your only way in. The assumption gets worse as Americana has invented the idea of the High School Paper and how that’s the go to for starting out NEWSFLASH: Not every country has that, we’re barely out of ‘Children are meant to be seen not heard’ phase! Now suddenly you expect a profession from a new born platform???

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This is obviously not about the present but back when the internet was small and media wasn’t yet social. We live in a meritocracy and that’s a very hard world for a writer to dwell in, the things we do are not put in a Resume; either we make it or we don’t. Nobody knows of the many times Louisa May Alcott tried to be a Gothic Writer, we just know about Little Women. We’ll never know how many names two sisters made up before Currer and Ellis Bell, we just know Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights.

We need to get beyond accomplishments being the only mark of existence, writers and artists live beyond the grid and have always done. We need to be let in from the cold and for someone to say the struggle is real, we’re of a vagabond, unreliable trade but one where the entertainment industry is sourced. There just needs to be more Keys to the Kingdom and a world beyond the Lock chain Resume

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