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Are Professional Writers Going Extinct?

Maria Elharaoui
4 min readMar 20, 2019

Can I still make a career out of writing?

Image by janeb13 from Pixabay

When I was in college and I told people I was an English major, I’d typically get asked the same question. But what will you do?

Even worse, when I’d say that I wanted to write, they’d get a funny look on their face, like I was an alien from another planet. Write? For a living? Preposterous!

But fast forward almost eight years, and here I am. Making a living out of writing. And as much as I love to write and feel so lucky than I can have a career doing it, I sometimes wonder, were those people a little bit right?

Is a writing career too good to be true?

Yes, I get paid to write, but does that mean I have a writing career? Some might argue yes. But the truth is I don’t really love what I do. So can I really call it my career?

Writing in the Real World

Before I entered the corporate world, I had several ideas of what my career might look like. I thought about being a book editor, paging through manuscripts and discovering the next great talent, all while writing my own masterpiece on the side. I thought about being a hard-hitting journalist covering the top stories of the day. And I thought about working in advertising and coming up with award-winning taglines for…

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Maria Elharaoui
Maria Elharaoui

Written by Maria Elharaoui

Copywriter. Blogger. Wife. Bibliophile. Romcom Lover. Tea Addict. Grammar Nerd. Email me: maria.elharaoui@gmail.com

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