After I got out of Peace Corps, I spent 10 days in the US before freaking out about the excesses of American consumerism (Did you ever realize that grocery stores have a WALL of salad dressing choices?!). So I got a job as a housekeeper at a luxury dude ranch in Colorado. One day the head chef was sick, and the sous chef was out of town. A VIP was coming to the ranch, and the manager asked me if I would handle dinner that night.

I had always loved cooking, and several times at the ranch I had ventured into the kitchen to make a fun dessert for the guests. So I was excited about making an actual meal as a "chef" for the VIP.

The main chef left a very precise and fairly complicated menu for me to follow. And I HATED it. I hated the timing, the precision needed, the lack of creativity, the necessity of doing it or else, the pressure. I HATED it.

I decided that evening that if one really loves to do something, one should avoid doing that thing for a living because one would grow to hate it. I had the same experience with teaching when I was an adjunct English teacher for several colleges in the Denver area. I love to teach, but I was running around like a madwoman trying to make enough money to live, and it was making me hate teaching.

I was wrong. I love, love, love writing. And I love, love, love writing for a living. I was pretty worried that I’d get into this and start resenting writing. After years of working in sales and before that working as a manager of education programs for an environmental nonprofit, my writing skills were pretty rusty. I wrote some fiction stories, and they were all less than 1000 words. I thought my writing skills were stunted forever.

But now I can dash off 500 words before breakfast here on this blog (I know — my posts are too long). I can write 1000 words about the fires in San Diego on a plane between here and Reno, sitting on the floor of the layover airport and mooching the internet connection from the United Red Carpet Club to get the story in on time.

For years I counseled my own writing students NOT to go into writing if they had talent. "Go into any other field, and your writing skills will make you a standout. If you go into writing, you’ll be in the midst of a billion other good writers, and you won’t be able to make the living you want to make." I still believe that’s true — that good writers in other professions further their careers as their skills show through. But if you have a talent for writing and a passion for writing and it makes you happy — you’ll be happy making a living as a writer.