Careers and entrepreneurship advice has large chunks devoted to certain kinds of focus and direction: imagining where you want to be in a year or 5 years from now, chanelling your energies and activities into achieving goals effectively.This is all fine, but the realities of life often generate different paths. Making the best of the opportunities which present themselves, and making a living through using all of your talents as well as those in which your expensive training has been invested.
When I was 9 I wanted to be a writer. I read copiously, and wanted nothing more than to have stories in print, while at the same time honing my skills as a recorder player and being seduced into taking up the flute by the glittering James Galway - yes, this was the 1970s - all beards, flared trousers and strange tastes in wallpaper. In the end music took up most of my life and still does, but I still became a writer as well - and I'm even paid for my efforts.
How did this happen?
I've always been a keen record collector, but as a poverty stricken musician the price of CDs was always something of a block to this enthusiasm. I used to sell old discs on an auction site and kept coming across a review site whose 'headers' I would copy and paste to save having to type out the disc information for sales. In the end I realised it would be more interesting to obtain my CDs for free, feeding my habit while I nurtured my fairly dormant writer ambitions by making reviews for MusicWeb International (MWI). This isn't paid, but you keep the discs sent for evaluation, so my library is now pretty vast. Yes, it's time-consuming, but also good fun and a way to find out about and listen seriously to music I would probably never have taken a gamble on in the shops.
So I was taken on as a reviewer, and confronted with my own writings published online on a near daily basis - as good a training ground as you can have and a steep autodidactic learning curve. This unpaid labour has gone on for a while now, and has resulted in a few sidelines: commissions to translate or edit booklet notes for new releases, that kind of thing. I'm well up to date on the latest musicians and record labels, and have made some interesting and fruitful contacts along the way as well as honing my writing skills. Fortunately, some record companies recognise this, and via MWI I hit the jackpot not so long ago - applying for and being given a job as blurb writer for the Naxos record label. This is something I would never even have heard about if it wasn't for MWI, and work I would never have been accepted for without all those years at the coal face of CD reviewing. It wasn't planned, was no part of any training I've ever had or any element of a 5 year trajectory towards achieving professional status as a writer, but it still happened as the result of hard work, enthusiastic and consistent engagement. It was only when I signed the contract, 'Dominy Clements: Writer', that I really realised what had happened.
I wonder what's next....
