Before I became a tea drinking lady of leisure, I had a proper job. I used to get up in the morning, put my brain in gear and write every day. And, at the end of the month I'd get a bit of money in bank account as way of a thank you for my efforts. I loved my job and would probably have gone back if the hours were better and I was paid more than a nursery place costs, but this blog post is not about the poor pay of local journalists.
I would possibly (although I never bothered finding out) have been paid the same amount of money whether I wrote one story a week or twenty-one stories a week. In fact, nobody I worked with bothered to find out, because as a breed local journalists these days have one thing in common - they are competitive. Let's face it, they don't do it for the money or the glory (somebody remove that soapbox from me).
If you asked me if I am a competitive person, I would probably say no I'm not. I don't care about winning, I've always been rubbish at running and all things sporty and I truly don't give two hoots how many hotels someone might have in a game of Monopoly. But what gets me out of bed in the morning is being able to write, having the time to write and producing words in an order that makes sense and conveys a message to people.
When I worked every day I had competition from other people who wanted the same as me. We competed with each other to have 'sell' our stories to the subs so they would want to include them in the paper. We would compete with each other for position in the paper, who would get that splash? We would compete with each other for the most number of quality stories in the paper. It was all good natured, it was all very healthy and it made me write and write well.
Nowadays, I do still write. But my time for writing is shorter than it used to be and I have far more distractions to keep from writing than I ever used to have. I am my only competition and that is hard. It is the toughest competition I have ever had. And lately I've been failing, falling far short of the bar I would like to set myself. I'm not going to meet my targets for this month, let alone this year.
What I do know is that I need competition, because if I didn't have to squeeze writing in between playgroups, school runs, cooking, cleaning, eating, drinking tea and singing nursery rhymes I know I wouldn't write at all. But without squeezing more time out of my day, how do I increase my competition?
