![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Tell me about yourself.
I'm suddenly struck with the desire to know how other people do the things that matter most to them, how they find and follow their passions.
How do you decide where your heart is? How do you carve out time and energy to pursue it?
Are you on a new road or one you've been following for a long time? What have you learned that could help others? What false starts have you made, what poor judgments? What have you compromised, and what do those compromises look like to you now?
How do you decide where your heart is? How do you carve out time and energy to pursue it?
Are you on a new road or one you've been following for a long time? What have you learned that could help others? What false starts have you made, what poor judgments? What have you compromised, and what do those compromises look like to you now?
no subject
On the one hand I don't actually recall ever not wanting to be a writer. On the other hand, all I've ever hear is "don't quite your day job." On the OTHER other hand, I want to do heaps of other things, albeit heaps of other don't quit your day job style things. I'm having doubts about my acting skills as the exams draw near, but that's easily solved - if I'm good enough to pass an audition or two then university will certainly improve me to the point where I could conceivably call that a career.
So basically, I want to do something interesting in uni like arts, so it'll provide me with writing material, and also because I've always regretted not learning musical theory and linguistics sounds fun and oooh, political science! I want to do a writing course, but I'm not that interested in journalism. I want to do an acting course. And I also want to do a course that will give me a day job not to quit, but the only thing I can think of that wouldn't kill me with boredom (well, more realistically the only one where I can use my only real marketable skill; read: making shit up) is marketing. And I don't know if you actually need a degree to be a copywriter or something but I suppose it helps.
So basically I'm stressing out over my exam marks even though my final choice might have an audition and not give a damn about them, and simultaneously trying to find something that will let me do as many of the above as possible.
But I'm an optimist. I'll end up doing whatever I want to do, as long as I manage to kick this terminal procrastination habit that has me sitting here writing to you instead of to my major English project.
no subject
I'm a big believer in exploring anything that's interesting to you, because one interest leads to another, and one acquaintance leads to another, and before you know it you're heading down a path you didn't know existed.
Also, you know how people tell you to be practical? The spouse and I both went to journalism school instead of pursuing (respectively) academia and fiction writing, because we both thought our real dreams were too impractical. Well, I discovered that nothing's practical if you don't love it enough to devote your real energy to it; I was a lousy journalist, and was terribly relieved when a side path opened up into technical writing. And he stuck with it for ten more years and then discovered that nothing's practical forever; the newspaper industry is imploding now and everybody's job is at risk.
Looking back, I wish I had looked at the things I did all day every day (reading fiction and writing fiction and reading folklore and hanging out in libraries) and actually done some research on the whole breadth of those fields, so that I'd know not just how people write novels but how people edit them, and market them, and create covers for them, and the ten thousand other things people do with fiction, and likewise for libraries and folklore studies -- because, you know, maybe I could be a novelist, or maybe behind the rockstar type job there are other jobs that would suit me, too.
no subject