Glen Martin: Find Your Happy Place

For a Communications class, we recently had a guest speaker, Glen Martin. He’s a featured blogger for The Huffington Post, former environmental reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, and author of three books. With over 20 years of experience in the writing industry, I was eager to absorb all the wisdom I was sure he’d impart about breaking into the industry and succeeding as a writer. In my mind, writing is an art form that can paint a picture just as well, if not better, than any paintbrush can. So, anyone who’s been able to make a profession of writing would be a valuable source, right? Wrong.

From atop his soapbox, this self-proclaimed Mastodon stuck roaming a new world of digital media overpopulated by Gen-Xers whose “truncated speech has impoverished the speaking language,” made clear that the end is nigh. Martin foretold the coming of a time where the newspaper, with the discoloration of age and tattered edges, would take its place in history alongside the “Dodo bird and the appendix.” It would be nothing more than a relic of an age long ago when times were simple, there was “real reporting”, and the world was a better place.

I did my part as a good student and listened to this cynical man drone on about being reduced to a consultant, who freelance writes, and daily peruses the writer-wanted ads on Craigslist. All I could hear, though, were orations eerily reminiscent of my own moment of teenage angst. It was rich with over-dramatic declarations of how horrible life was, with a family just didn’t “get me”, and ideas that I could fade away into nothing completely unnoticed by anyone in the world (don’t judge me; I already admitted that I was dramatic).Ironic that it’s a man in his early 60s that helps me understand why my mom likes to refer to that period as my “dark ages”. I get it now. It’s easy to focus on the doom and gloom. There will always be some obstacle to face and a line of naysayers and pessimists. There’s going to be some reason to feel like you can’t, and yes, the world will change. But adversity is a poor excuse for quitting. Instead, look for some motivation or find your happy place, but keep going.

So, as this century moves into its own teenage years think on these words from the ever brilliant, Anonymous: “Our world is one where people don’t know what they want, but are willing to go through hell to get it.” So if writing is your medium, write. Besides, if the newspaper went extinct what would moms and crafters cover their tables with before arts and crafts time?