---
title: "Becoming a Writer – Reflections on a Trip to Idaho"
date: 2008-10-13
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canonical_url: https://idratherbewriting.com/2008/10/13/becoming-a-writer-reflections-on-a-trip-to-idaho/
---
# Becoming a Writer – Reflections on a Trip to Idaho
Last week I drove up at Rexburg, Idaho to give a presentation on technical writing to the English majors at Brigham Young University Idaho (BYU-I) as part of their annual Pre-Professional Writing Conference. Most of the students in the group intend to pursue a literary career, such as writing books, editing manuscripts in publishing houses, or teaching literature in college or high school.

I was scheduled to present on technical writing, but my presentation felt more than that to me. I felt a mission to correct what had been falsely taught to me as a college student and which caused me to wander around for five years of my professional life trying to figure things out. Let me explain.

When I was a student at BYU Provo, I took an English survey course (typical of most English major curriculums). When the technical writing professor spoke to us (right after the cowboy literature professor, the feminist literature professor, and the postmodern deconstructionist professor), she explained that one task technical writers might do is format phone books. She then showed pictures of phone book layouts and mentioned font.

As I sat there, a young ideal-minded, writing-bound student, I took a personal vow to never become her. To never end up so boring, so undriven. Ending up in a little office, formatting phone books all day would be the equivalent of literary death. I eternally struck the possibility of technical writing from my career's vocabulary. Never, never, never would I become a technical writer. 

After I graduated from BYU with a degree in English, I didn't know what to do, so I earned an MFA in literary nonfiction from Columbia in New York. All through my MFA, I felt anxiety about the career path I would follow. My wife gave birth to our first child at the time, and the cost of living in New York maxed out our income each month.

When I did graduate, I found a composition teaching job abroad at The American University in Cairo and spent the next two years in Egypt. After two years, I realized that my composition teaching career was going nowhere. I also realized I hated teaching -- a fact not often considered by prospective literature students who simply plan on teaching without ever having taught.

Above all, I despised grading student papers, justifying over and over the B and C grades. At one point I dropped my grading pen and noted that reading student essays was not only laborious, it was also damaging to my own sense of writing. I wanted to write, not teach. So I left composition teaching and moved back to the U.S.

With a BA in English, an MFA in literary nonfiction, and two years of full-time teaching experience, I wasn't marketable for any high-paying career. Through a friend of my sister, I landed a job as a copywriter for a Scientologist-heavy health and nutrition company in Clearwater, Florida, whose main product was a bottle of protein pills for triathletes. Earning 32k a year, without benefits, I wrote marketing copy for the company, exhausting my creative energy with press releases, web copy, product fliers, brochures, newsletter articles, email campaigns, and anything else I could write to promote and sell more BioBuild.

After six months, the $9,000 of savings I'd built up in Egypt steadily declined. One night I sat down to calculate my financial standings and realized I needed a higher paying job if I was to survive. At that point I remembered what a colleague in Egypt once told me, that I would be a perfect fit for technical writing. So I began my search for an entry-level job as a technical writer.

Thanks to some articulate copy I wrote about how protein works, a hiring manager at a financial company in Florida (who had a PhD in biology) saw potential in me, and together with a sample help file I wrote in RoboHelp, hired me onto their team. I was their first hire after four years of a freeze from the tech stock crash.