writer, editor, type-A Midwesterner
Seventeen.
That’s how many jobs I racked up in my journey to full-time freelancing. At least, that’s how many I can remember at the moment. From the age of 16 to 28, I was nearly constantly in a cycle of becoming dissatisfied with a job, looking for a new one, interviewing, getting hired, loving the new job, doing the best I could there, realizing it wasn’t quite right, becoming dissatisfied with it, etc., etc.
Writing is the best. But as anyone who writes for a living will tell you, it also can be the worst. The deadlines! The word counts! The interviews that seemed fine at the time but have no decent quotes! Writing as a profession means composing through sleeplessness, idealessness and cleverlessness. It can be monotonous.
These things sometimes distract from the wonder that is the writing process. And is it a truly amazing wonder. Crafting a piece of work, using only brain juice and finger power, that can move people, inspire them, entertain or even change someone, is a sort of miracle. Most weeks I write between seven and ten stories, and believe me, they almost all feel like miracles by the end. This is due to a series of tiny, brilliant moments that happen during the writing process. No matter what kind of -lessness one is writing through, these stages in the process begin to happen, and you’re in it. You’re wowed. You’re part of a miracle.
The biggest synonym-related issue I keep bumping up against lately in my writing (as opposed to all of the other synonym-related issues) has been coming up with new ways to describe blurred lines. Hazy boundaries? Fuzzy fringes? Petering perimeters?
The thing that makes this rhetorical quandary interesting is that it’s not due to any one particular trend happening in one particular industry. I cover a number of topics, and in the last few months I’ve written about the blurring lines between brand publishing and advertising, engineering and medicine, women and tech leadership, art and economic development, media companies and technology firms, and, most recently, between urban and suburban places (coming soon!).
Natalie Burg 