Support an Aspiring Writer This Holiday Season | by Ben Ulansey | Dec, 2024
Yep, it’s that kind of post. But it’s also about why I write and what I aim to do here
Beginning to write online has been a weighty gamble for me. For many years, I’d known I could never be happy working a 9–5 and in the years that followed high school, I floundered aimlessly. When I began in journalism in early 2022, I’d already known for 10 years that I loved to write.
The job I began with was as a columnist for a local paper, and though a few of the assignments I was given meshed with my interests, most felt like soulless excuses to put words on a page. Adding madness to tedium was the fact that my editor could make whatever alterations to my work that she wanted. Were it only the occasional run-on or spelling error that needed correcting, it wouldn’t have been so egregious. But at best, she would introduce errors to my articles where previously none had been, and at worst, she would alter the pieces so radically that the very stance they communicated would be different in the final, published product.
I took little pride in being involved with the paper, and I already had a foot, arm, and roughly four fifths of my soul out of the door of that short-lived occupation by the time I began writing online. While I can’t say I enjoyed the journalism stint for…
