I constantly battle imposter syndrome. I’m not sure what level of success I will have to meet to overcome that feeling. This year, I have had more moments when I had to stop and look back and say to myself, “Yes, you really did that!” I’ve sold four articles this year and had several near acceptances. I also have a weekly blog that I write for travel and tourism for North Park, CO. I have also gotten a chance to work with some pretty awesome people, including some corporate content creation, networking, and other grown-up sounding work terms.
I’ve gotten to Forrest Gump my way into several events. Why? Because of something 20-something me would have never expected. I get to include the term “Journalist” with my list of writerly credentials. Among others. Let me talk a little bit about the journalism aspect of what I do. And a little bit about how I got here.
In college, I wanted to be a rock star. I was in a band with some guys I grew up with. We played one battle of the bands—which got rained out—and mostly did gigs out of our garage for the neighbors. The house we were sharing had a keg fridge, stocked with shitty green Coors Lite leftovers from St. Paddy’s Day. The neighbors often came over to listen to us jam and try to kill the keg.
We made one album, basically a studio demo with eight songs. I played drums. We went the way of Oasis and fought a lot. The only reason I bring this up is because of two incidents that year. The first was one night my roommates were in the garage, practicing, and I was in my room, writing. I wrote a melancholic story of a man going through a breakup. At the time, I was reflecting on my own moodiness about a decision I was considering about breaking up with my own girlfriend at the time. The relationship wasn’t going anywhere. Neither was my drumming. But I thoroughly enjoyed writing. I wanted to write books. Sci-fi, fantasy…mostly.
I had been put off from the idea of being a journalist earlier that year when a man murdered his roommates in Durango, CO and drove all the way to Greeley to hold a former girlfriend and her roommates hostage in one of UNC’s high-rise dorms.
As an English major, I had friends who were Journalism majors. They ran towards the lights and sirens. They were there to watch the whole thing unfold. I got the hell out of there. I probably went back to my shared house and bickered with my roomies about why they were constantly playing quarters from Friday through Sunday with random people they invited over to drink green beer—and they got on my case about drinking the scotch.
I heard from my writer friends about how they watched the SWAT team take out the gunman. The thrill in their eyes was sobering. There wasn’t enough scotch to make me think anything about that was cool.
A couple years later, I watched two Superbowl riots unfold outside of my apartment (Broncos Back-To-Back). The first one was unsettling, but the second one…I wanted to go out with my camera and take photos of the chaos. My girlfriend at the time objected wholeheartedly, saying I was going to get killed. Later I married her and proceeded to do very little with my writing except beat my head against the wall of rejections for SF/F markets for the next fifteen years.
If that didn’t convince me writing wasn’t for me, then neither did her insistence that my writing sucked. We divorced in 2014. My love for writing was one of the catalysts.
For the last ten years, I have been supplementing my income with side-gigs and freelance writing for companies. The university I worked for laid me off just before COVID, along with over a hundred other long-time employees. Yes, this was the same University where the hostages had been held and SWAT took the guy out as he reached for a basket they lowered to him in the dormitory window full of Diet Cokes.
As everyone was under lockdown and masked up, I leaned hard into writing full time. Most of it was corporate. SEO content. Copy for law firms. Advertising and marketing. I also sat down and wrote a book about my life for the last twenty years–still working on that. It was healing. Cathartic. A year before the pandemic, I had a moment where I decided to change my life. I decided to become a Travel Writer.
If I thought breaking into fiction was tough, travel blogging was much harder. But I worked hard at it, and I continue to work hard at it. In many ways it has been more rewarding than writing about dragons and spaceships. The places I have visited have grit. They have bright faces and laughter and sad histories that I am here for.
A buddy of mine who majored in journalism told me once that the most important part of being a reporter is skepticism. I’m not entirely sure I agree with that (maybe I’m skeptical). I think you need to be critical, and really work things through, but it also helps to be a little stupid.
So why does being a dumbass work? Well, one of the things I’ve learned about the journalistic stories I’ve gotten is you need to be in the moment. You need to be open to learning new things, asking questions. It helps to be a bit ignorant–yet receptive–because you are allowing yourself to understand a story as it forms. You ask questions, but more importantly, you pay attention to details. Then you mash it all together in a way that makes sense to other people who knew nothing about what you just learned and you try to be true to the story, if not the people involved.
As they said in Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch, “Try to make it sound like you wrote it that way on purpose.”
I can’t learn anything about a topic if I already know everything about it. It’s a lot like that Bruce Lee quote about “Be like water.” I approach a subject knowing I’m going to need to take the form of whatever the story requires. Unlike my friends in college—none of whom continued on with journalism by the way—I have reached this part of my life in a whole other way, from an entirely different direction. Maybe I’m a bit of a humanist, because I see these stories that need to be gathered and need to be told. I see extraordinary people who fascinate me. I discover stories I think others would love to read about.
Being a journalist gets you in close. And life on the road has given me a chance to get in much closer with some of my stories. I’m at a deeper level. I’m not someone flying in for a weekend to smash and grab a story for a deadline, to raid the minibar and fly back to forget it all as soon as it’s written. I’m here to sit with the people I interview. To sit in the situation with them. I get to write about things I truly care about too. That’s my flex on twenty years in Academia. I really enjoy what I get to do now.
And I get to meet some truly exceptional people. I get to have rad experiences (for lack of a better word), and it’s my job to be there! No! I can’t go away. I’m workin’ here!
But in spite of all the access I get, and what people might think when they sit and visit with me, sometimes I don’t get how lucky I am. I’m just me. I’m not Sebastian Junger. Or Jon Krakauer. I’m not Marie Colvin. Or even Andrew Callaghan. Maybe they aren’t them either. It’s funny to walk around in this meat suit most of the time, getting to have some very cool experiences and then thinking to myself, “Wow, that felt pretty…natural.”
It’s nothing like being a rock star. It’s nothing like being a famous author. It’s not even like being the one person in the College who can fix the room schedule. I’m an observer. I get to care about people and situations nobody would even know about sometimes. Like that tree that falls in the forest bit. I’m there to listen to it fall.
Sometimes I don’t talk much about what I do because I do feel like a fraud. Like some warty monster is going to rise up out of the depths and say, “You aren’t a writer!”
Anyway, the TLDR of this is I’m glad I get the chance to do this. It’s fulfilling. It’s necessary. I feel like I’ve taken a page from Viktor Frankl’s book and found meaning in my life…in my late 40s. Over the years I’ve accumulated skills and experiences I never could have scratched the surface of in my 20s in college. And right now, I actually feel like less of an impostor than I ever have before.
I just wish my feet didn’t hurt so much sometimes. I’m off to a late start, but I think it’s a good one.