You hear the mail arrive through the door so you hurl yourself down the stairs, flinging your nine-year-old dog over the banister when she dares to get in the way of your frenzied dash, ignoring her yelps as she slams into the back of the couch... You sift through bills and pizza menus, when all of a sudden you see what you've been waiting for. You rip open the envelope and - lo and behold - you've been offered that publishing job you've always dreamed of. The letter heartily congratulates you on being the successful candidate and warmly welcomes you into the fold with more compliments and superlatives than you could shake a stick (or your now badly limping dog) at. However, before you excitedly write an equally gushing acceptance letter, you might want to read on to find out why this ‘dream' editorial job might not be so desirable after all...
When I left university five years ago, I was absolutely convinced that it was the publishing world to which I wanted to devote my future. It all seemed so glamorous, and yet I'd still be doing something mentally stimulating. I'd be being paid to work with words, while also enjoying fantastic perks like glitzy launch parties, which would inevitably lead to me meeting and befriending many celebrities; we'd all hang out in trendy London bars, wearing new slinky dresses every night, sipping Chablis between perfectly glossed, plumped-up lips, and taking slow, sophisticated drags on reassuringly expensive Davidoff cigarettes. How wrong could I be?
The reality jarred heavily against the backdrop of my idealized expectations. The parties were few and far between (three in as many years), and I was so busy struggling to meet constant deadlines that I barely had time to brush my hair each morning, let alone gloss and plump up my lips... My days were predominantly occupied by laborious fact-checking and changing the occasional comma to a semi-colon, more often than not only to change it back again two minutes later. I loved the subject area of the work, but the endless list of arbitrary rules and stylistic restrictions managed to squeeze all of the joy out of it. I resented having to get up for work each and every morning, dreading the day ahead, filled as it would inevitably be with the non-stop editing of shoddily constructed essays and proofreading a wide range of error-littered manuscripts, supposedly drafted by the country's leading academics.
Not wanting to admit defeat, I stuck it out in the job for three long years, all the time desperately trying to convince myself that things would improve and that, sooner or later, I'd rediscover my love of the written word. It never happened. I got more and more bogged down in the pedantic nit-picking, and knew that if I didn't resign my frustration with the job would end up permanently ruining my thirst for literature.
So I quit. I took some time out, before deciding to give freelancing writing a go. I earn a lot less money than I used to, but have not for one second regretted my choice. Sure, I'd love to make more money and to have the security of a steady flow of work, but of far more importance to me is the fact that I have finally regained the love of language that I'd first developed in early childhood but that three years in a publishing environment had all but beaten out of me.
If your heart is set on entering this profession, I wouldn't ever want to steamroll you into changing your mind, but I would strongly urge you to question, and I mean REALLY question, whether it is the right choice for you. So many people I know in publishing entered it for the same shallow, misguided reasons that I did; almost all of these people have, like me, ended up deeply unhappy in their ‘dream' job.
On this occasion, at least, it's time to stop dreaming and start doing some thinking.
