Books for your Profession
or what you wish you could be when you grow up
How do you react with you find a voice of bits of sage advice and a fresh perspective on a subject you love? Do you smile to yourself, assured that there are writers out there who can connect with your career? Do you immediately gobble up the book in a night and savor over it’s contents like a dog licking a meat bone he just found buried in his backyard?
When I find such a book, I go through it carefully with a pen nearby to mark the passages and pages that strike my inner core as a writer. I carefully devour the pages as if I sat at a feast I had prepared all day in the kitchen and now chewed each bite fully to savor every flavor.
To my sadness, I forgot such books existed for writers.
At my previous job my boss was frequently getting us books to better ourselves. If there was a book that was a good influence on people in the industry she was quick to get a dozen or so and pass them out.
The last book she passed out was the latest personality test for business people. Dutifully I read the book and took the test. What I hadn’t expected was the results. It didn’t reflect my job; it reflected my profession as a writer. It described what I did within stories. I was shocked and happy.
Happy that even though I wasn’t spending as much time writing as I wanted that I was still very much a writer in my most secret of hearts.
Shocked that the results weren’t really weren’t for my job. (Hint to self: while I was good at my job I wasn’t doing what I really wanted to do).
This past Christmas my father sent me a book about writing and I fell in love again with the process of writing. I had forgotten that such books not only encourage us to continue to write but they give us new ideas and they remind us to be patient but persistent with our work.
It is like land receiving rain after a long bout of drought.
I open my mouth to the precious rain and drink.
