Writing is Writing

At the T.V. station, my job was literally to come up with news stories every day. And then manage those stories down to completion...to live broadcast. It was not an easy job as we juggled reporters, vehicles, and cameras, but I'm thankful for the experience. I would scour the papers, read the internet (a relatively new source), check emails and faxes, take phone calls, and listen to the police scanner.

It was a lot of daily pressure I didn't want so it wasn't the job for me but the skills I walked away with, wow! I learned to dissect stories and spin them in different directions. In minutes, we could formulate ideas to localize a national story with man-on-the-street interviews and other techniques. The job built my confidence to become a successful freelance writer.

To this day, I still use the skills I learned as it's a good way to practice writing. A lot of famous novelists started out as journalists. To me, writing is writing. That's the point, you just have to keep writing.

Some days I'll get a song idea and write that. Other days, a poem and I'll write that.

This weekend I had an idea for a children's book and started capturing those ideas. It doesn't matter if these ideas are published or not, but it's important to take them seriously and write them down. Emily Dickinson only had a handful of poems published while living. Her big breakthrough came after she died. However, she wrote over a thousand poems during her lifetime.

We as writers know how good that must have felt. That release of the gift flowing through your mind, down to your heart, infiltrating your soul, and oozing out of your fingertips onto the medium. Practice is practice and you never know where it can lead. Keep writing :-)