Memoir of a Wannabe Writer
One of my first memories of language was one of utter rebellion. I was five or six years old and I vividly remember hanging off the side ladder of my bunk bed and deliberately misspelling ‘ T H E ’ to my sevenish year old sister and her friend Emily. Why did I do it? Well, simply put, it would have been entirely off brand to spell it right. See, my role models were Dennis the Menace, Calvin and Hobbes, and a motley crew of toothless athletes. I aspired to be a dirt covered rapscallion, and spelling werds rite was’int part of the package. Heck, I didn’t even try to speak properly, I rolled my R’s like I was a native Bostonian. In other words, I lived for the smiley, eye-rolling attention of being a stereotypical boy.
Now, stereotypes and childhood role models aside, I had plenty of other issues with language. I was a passionate believer that math and science reigned supreme, and that by comparison, most language subjects were quite unimportant. This may have been the silly idea of a kid, but I kinda felt like I was led there by my parents and teachers. It just seemed like they placed more prestige on doing well in Math than in English. And since I was a hawk for prestige, I doubled-down in Math and goofed off in English. Naturally, I fell behind… which made me think English was even more unimportant… which made me even worse at it… and from there, it kinda just snowballed into a learning disability.
Unsurprisingly, when it came time to go to University, I took mostly math and science courses. They were all big, competitive classes, and it seemed like everyone in them knew what they wanted to be. I was surrounded by the doctors and engineers of the future: young men and woman who brimmed with certainty. Me on the other hand? I was totally lost. Eventually, I landed myself in my school’s aviation program. Which was probably because I liked how straightforward and profesional it was, and because I thought being a pilot might entice the ladies. Unfortunately, not for me.. Anyway.. Due to my new-found direction, I registered in several environmental science courses like Weather and Climate and Earth System Science. And as the semester went by and these classes unfolded, I noticed that they all conveyed the same general message — We need environmental solutions yesterday! As this same message was drilled into me day-after-day, I started to feel an incessant need to share what I was learning. I was convinced that if others knew what I knew, we would have a carbon tax, a ban on plastic, and countless other environmental solutions. Because of this passionate, and perhaps naive, belief, it became clear that I needed to express myself. I needed to write. For the first time in my life, I valued learning how to write.
Out of all these feelings, I created an environmental website that tried to give people a bottom-up understanding of environmental processes, problems, and solutions. To accomplish this, I wrote articles to explain phenomena like the Greenhouse Gas Effect, Geoengineering, Cloud Albedo, and Fake Documentaries. The more I wrote, the more I learned about writing. I learned the difference between affect and effect, then and than, to and too, and much more. It felt great to improve my writing and to apply my education. But eventually, since I didn’t want to work for free, I needed to find a way to monetize. To start, I brought Google Adsense onto the website. I’m not sure what I expected from these ads, but the two-dollars per thousand visitors was definitely a letdown. It meant that I needed thirty-thousand visitors per month just to keep the website online. I also tried other methods to make money on the site, but they all fell flat. At this point, I was spending my nights writing content filled with Amazon Affiliate links and scouring the web to find stylish, sellable, and environmentally conscious t-shirts; and then I remembered, this was not why I started Enviroshare. As this reality set in, I realized that even though some people valued my writing, there was no good way for me to monetize it. And as I realized this about my writing I noticed a similar thing occurring to other writers. Their articles, lyrics, and scripts; were bringing so much value to the world, but not monetary value. Sure, writers sell books, songs, TV shows, and more, but none of these ventures are celebrated for being overly accessible, stable, or lucrative. If anything, they are the business models of people who can afford to work for free. Which in reflection, is maybe what my teachers and parents were trying to tell me. Maybe as a seven-year-old kid I had it right;
Writing isn’t valued in today’s capitalist society.
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Check out more of my stuff at www.conorwriter.com
