Am I a writer?

Four months ago, my co-worker pointed to an ad indicating a job opening for The Korea Herald, and suggested that I apply as a journalist.  She felt that I had a significant edge since the job required gathering information in Korean and writing in English.

I contemplated about the job.  I honestly felt insecure because I never considered writing as my forte but a hobby in which I had no talent.  Growing up, not only was English my second language but I had to compete against all the Honors/AP students, which squandered my self-esteem.  I learned to dislike writing because I thought I was incompetent and all the teachers seemed to agree.  But in retrospect, it wasn't that I was talentless.  It was just that I started the race a bit later.  8 years later, to be exact, which is a significant disadvantage for a 14 year old starting high school.  What I didn't realize was, if you added my knowledge of Korean into the equation, I wasn't "linguistically" challenged, as I identified myself.  In fact, I would've been above average in my opinion.
 
It wasn't until college that people began to compliment my writing and speech.  I especially enjoyed writing and planning for presentations because it felt so free.  I didn't have to worry about the number of paragraphs and whether each of them had enough CD's and CM's, and all this allowed me to be creative with a purpose.  In addition, the vast amount of reading as a history major significantly improved my English.  I slowly began to enjoy writing, despite still feeling a bit insecure.  In fact, after graduation, I worked as a part time writing tutor at a community college and eventually ended up as an English teacher in Korea.  It seemed as my fear of the English language was resolved.

But the job ad made me wonder quite a bit.  Do I really like writing?  Do I like English?  Enough for it to be a career?

The answer was no.

Even though I thought I had grown to like writing, I realized that I didn't like writing itself.

This should've became apparent when I was working as a translator.  Translating is a job where you try to limit your own opinion and concentrate only on the languages themselves.  Inevitably, there is  always decision making and opinions involved, but they are limited.  What I realized was that I was an artist with a need to express myself.  I thought I liked writing but I realized that writing was merely a medium of expression, just like photography and music - what I love are expressions and the ideas that are in my head - not the medium itself. 

Take for example, John Steinbeck's East of Eden, where he uses beautiful poetry to describe the Salinas Valley.  Without doubt, I appreciate the writing but I am not drawn to the language itself.  Poetic language to me is like a ballet.  I respect the time and effort, I recognize it as an art form, but personally, I have no interest in it whatsoever. 

Then what kind of writing am I interested in?  Writing similar to Orwell's Animal Farm.  The book, hardly 150 pages, spends very little time being descriptive and beautiful.  It is terse, witty, and clever.  The only element of style I'm concerned with is pace and succinctness.  After that, I only care about the content. 

May be you can argue that pace and succinctness is exactly what a reporter needs.  That may be true, but keep in mind that I used to hate assigned writing in high school due to its immense restrictions.  I may succeed as a columnist someday, but never as a reporter.  Their job is incredibly important, but it seems dull writing about facts while showing least amount of opinion possible. I need the freedom to express myself.

So am I a writer?  Hardly.  And it's ironic how I emphasized pace and succinctness yet the entry itself is so slow and verbose.  But despite my ineptitude, I do enjoy expressing myself through writing; it's just that I'm not concerned with pampering it.  I would hate to be in an English class, analyzing every line of a poem.