I've spent most of my adult life writing for a living. My first paid gig was in my early 20s when I wrote a biography page for a Beatles fan site and received $9. I soon landed writing and editorial jobs and eventually moved into content marketing and related fields. I have been fortunate to have been able to carve out a niche in this world, and to say I've learned a lot in doing it would be but a thumbnail of the truth.
While writing is my day job, it is also my obsession. The communicating word was and still is mystical to me, like runes carved upon stones or a witch spitting curses from the forest. I have always written for my own satisfaction, but spending my days writing for someone else's (or the algorithm's) satisfaction has exacted a price. I fear, after doing this for so long, my writing style became more starch than substance.
There is a plague of literalness in writing today. It is served by the twin poxes of simple clarity and left hemisphere orthodoxy. Words are narrow in what they can communicate on their own, but in arrangement of sentences and paragraphs they can deliver beauty and confusion and wisdom, striking at our inner selves with such force that we must stop and consider what we are reading, internalizing what's on the screen and daring to create thoughts of our own. It's that moment that makes writing worth practicing, and it's what I am practicing here in this blog. The right hemisphere's forgotten purview (as Iain McGilchrist might formulate it.)