I knew I had nailed the interview and it was shortly coming to a close. The interviewers had been gregarious and made the sterile, gray conference room as inviting as a living room. I researched the company well and had practiced my responses on the hour-and-ten-minute drive down. While I was nailing it, I was getting hungry. I couldn’t wait for my post-interview treat.
Then the interviewer asked me: “Why do you enjoy writing so much? Especially when it can be agonizing sometimes.”
I froze. I’d been writing professionally for nearly a decade at that point, and no one had ever asked me point blank before why I enjoyed writing.
And it is agonizing, when the words won’t come. There is nothing more frustrating than watching a cursor flash brightly on an empty page.
Tearing your hair out while on a deadline because your brain won’t produce a single coherent thought. Frantically searching synonyms for ‘skills.’ Wondering if you accidentally used the wrong ‘there’ and missed it while proofreading. Racking your brain for a new and sexy way to sell microwave oven parts.
Once, while working with an account executive, she told me she could “never do what you do” when I was complaining about trying to write ad copy. Which was so strange to me, since I had used that exact same phrase to my friend a few nights earlier when she had been describing a night shift at the hospital, where she worked as a pediatric ICU nurse. Even when spiraling in a bad case of writer’s block, I would much rather be staring at an empty page than earning hundreds of thousands of dollars in the medical field. A bad day as a writer is better than the best day in any other field.
I finally ended up telling the interviewer, “Writing is truly an exquisite form of torture, and there is nothing else I’d rather do.”
Faith Brody 