Writing

Ink in My Blood Since Eight

I’ve always been a writer since the age of 8. Writing was my life. It wasn’t a hobby. It was how I breathed.

It started with pen pals. I’d wait for the mailman like he was Santa. Foreign stamps, thin airmail paper, handwriting from girls in Germany, boys in Japan, kids in South Africa. I learned how to tell a story in a letter, how to make someone I’d never met feel like they were sitting on my bedroom floor. I learned that words could cross oceans. That was power, and I was hooked.

From there I was working on the Global Teen Club International with my mother. She ran it, but I was in it — editing newsletters, interviewing other teens, typing up stories on a typewriter that jammed if I hit the keys too hard. We put real paper in real envelopes and sent it all over the world. We had members in 40 countries. I learned deadlines weren’t suggestions. I learned you double-check a name because misspelling someone’s name in print is disrespect. I learned the difference between “your” and “you’re” mattered because the world was reading.

That’s when I started learning about journalism and the right way to write instead of making digital magazines which are not the same as the real glossy magazines. Journalism had rules. Lead with the facts. Attribute your quotes. Check your sources twice. Cut the fluff. Know AP style. Know libel. Know that your byline means you stand behind every word. A glossy magazine was an event. You could smell the ink. You could hear the pages turn. You could see the layout, the photo credits, the cutlines, the pull quotes — all of it deliberate. Someone laid that out by hand. Someone bled to make it perfect.

The internet created bloggers which are not the same as journalists. I said what I said. A blog is a diary with a publish button. There’s no editor, no fact-checker, no accountability. You can post a rumor, call it “tea,” and by noon it’s truth to a million people. That’s not reporting. That’s talking. Bloggers can write well, sure. Some do. But writing well and being a journalist are not the same job.

Journalism cares if it’s true before it cares if it’s first. Blogging cares if it’s first before it cares if it’s true. Magazines had mastheads. You knew who the publisher was, who the editor-in-chief was, who to call if they got it wrong.

I’ve been a writer since I was 8 years old, and I learned it the hard way — the right way. Through pen pals that taught me voice. Through a teen club that taught me deadlines. Through journalism that taught me truth matters more than clicks. I’m not knocking the internet. I use it. But I know the difference between a writer and someone who posts. I know the difference between a magazine and a website with pretty pictures.

Words were my first love and they’ll be my last. But I respect them too much to treat them cheap. I came up when writing was craft, not content. And I’m still writing like somebody’s going to hold me to it — because they should.