Gina the Writer

My writing quasi-career began not as a job, but as a blogger. And not even as a my-opinion-is-more-important-than-yours-type of blogger; I had written dozens of articles before I ever gave anyone the web address, and even then, it was by request. I really and truly wrote only for myself.

Now that I write for the paper, I have to generate at least one article per week. Normally, I pick through the hundred things in the news, or the thousand things that bounce around in my mind, and write about whichever one happens to be the most newsworthy, the most controversial, or sometimes just the easiest to pen 800 words about.

There have been weeks when I can't stop writing. Suddenly there seem to be a myriad of interesting and important topics, and I'll pump out five or six articles in a matter of days. I'll see something on the news or in the paper, and it consumes my thoughts to the extent that I've actually gotten out of bed to write a piece while the words were still fresh in my mind.

Here we are more than two years after I started blogging, and everything I write, while it may go through a more complex editing process than before, is much the same. I am very fortunate to be in a position where I choose the subject matter of my articles, and I have fantastically open-minded and tolerant employers to thank for that.

How strange that, even after more than 60 published articles, I still feel like a fraud calling myself a writer. I've never been to journalism school, nor have I take a single writing course. I wasn't pursued as a writer by any publication, I took a leap of faith and hoped someone would find promise in my work. Even though I am able to say I get paid for the things I write, I would never be so bold as to describe my occupation as "writer".

This train of thought has cropped up for a very obvious (at least to me), Freudian reason: lately I've had to go over my own work and choose which articles from the past year are the best. Not the funniest, not the most newsworthy, but the best in a technical sense. And this task of choosing puts me and my ego in a difficult position.

I don't know if my idea of funny was funny to someone else. Maybe the most hilarious moment of my week, which I wrote about in detail and with great flourish, soared over the heads of most others and fell flat.

I don't know if my explanation of an issue adequately told the story I was trying to tell. Maybe I had false expectations of the public's familiarity with a subject, didn't use enough back story, and people were wondering what in the world I was talking about.

I don't know if my work is good enough. Maybe, even though I know lots of big words and roughly where to place my commas, my writing is just a bunch of partially incoherent, irrelevant nonsense, by someone with too many opinions and not enough writing chops to properly construct a print-worthy article.

Maybe, maybe, maybe. I don't know. What I'm assuming are words uttered often among writers of my experience,and perhaps even occasionally by seasoned ones from time to time.

I'm reluctant to admit, this is the one area of my life where I have sufficient self-doubt. Not so much in the validity of my opinions, or the sincerity behind what I write, but in the cogency of my arguments, the clarity of my points, and the style from a technical perspective.

It is during these moments of self-doubt that, while I simultaneously end up turning them into an article for this week's paper, I have to remember that I do this for myself, just like I did in the beginning. I might have an audience larger than one, but that hasn't changed my purpose or my goal. And since my goal is to use the skills I have to rid my swirling brain of some of it's overwhelming content, I have accomplished what I set out to do before a single issue of the paper is purchased.

So I'm sitting here, for what has to be the fiftieth time, looking over my work from the past year and wondering which articles are fit to be judged by a trained eye. I still haven't even figured out which are those of Gina, the wife, the mother of two, the university drop-out and frequent windbag, and which are those of Gina the professional writer. I haven't even decided if those are the same people. But I have decided neither of them are going to stop.