I am 18, and I am doing the one thing in the world I want to do more than anything else - I am a writer. People pay me money to do that (some days I don't know why, but it's true).
I'm trying desperately hard not to take it for granted. I know that I landed this job through the luckiest set of circumstances in the world (if I believed in luck, that is). I met a pretty famous writer who decided to mentor me, invited me to take over his website, and then secured a book deal for me.
When I signed the contract with Crossway, I remember asking Mom, "How many 18-year-olds can say they just landed their dream job?"
Writing a book is a consuming passion for me. I work on it almost every day, think about it all the time. This dream job doesn't have set hours, nor does it have an office or a cubicle and I don't wear hot-shot business suits. As many days as not, I write in my pajamas, with no makeup, my hair in a ponytail, lying flat on my stomach on the floor in front of my laptop.
It's a good life.
I read lots of books, more now than ever. I check out piles of books from the library and download dozens onto my Kindle. I read books to help me in my book, but I also read books that are totally unrelated. I read mostly great books (though I can't help that a few not-so-great ones occasionally trickle into the flow).
I run a few times a week, sometimes to think and sometimes to clear my mind. When you spend a lot of hours lying on the floor in front of a computer, you need to get up and move around.
I'm not sure if I believe in writer's block, but I believe that some days it's harder to write and harder to think and words just don't come as easily. Other days I can write for hour upon happy hour with no thought to time or word count or whether this book will be the worst book ever written. Other days I can't.
I spend about 90% of my time editing. Re-reading, re-writing, re-wording, fixing, changing, searching the thesaurus, hacking through dense writing, trimming flabby writing, deleting great chunks of text and scratching my head to replace it. That isn't always fun.
But the worst part of being a writer is receiving critique. And I receive a lot of it. It's teaching me to have tough skin and better drafts. It's always painful but it's also one of the best parts of being a writer.
I think I had this vision of me alone all the time, holed up with my laptop, writing in solitude until I emerged one day with a masterpiece in my hand. Ha. Again I say, ha. It takes a village to raise a child and a village to write a book. I need people to read my words and hate them and teach me how to make them better.
That's how a good book is written.
Being 18 and a full-time writer is pretty weird. Most of my friends are in school or working part-time and trying to figure out what to do with their lives. That was me literally four months ago. Now I'm here. God moves in mysterious ways.
Being 18 and having your dream job is also pretty weird, pretty amazingly wondrously fantastic - but also a little weird. When people ask me what I want to do in the future I get to say, "I'm doing it."
I am so blessed, it's hard to describe. I am so grateful to the Giver of dream jobs and opportunities. I'm so excited that in this dream job I get to study God's Word to be better at it, to write about His glory and wisdom and powerful, life-changing truth.
This moment in my life, being 18 and a writer, is indescribably good and I am grateful for it.