Chapter 60: Ambition...For Better or Worse
Writerland is a newsletter from The Delacorte Review whose mission is to help writers tell the stories they need to tell.
* * *
Ambition can propel a career. It can also sap it of its joy. Ambition can spur a writer to take risks, to strive for greatness. But it can also mar achievements with a nagging voice that says, again and again and again, "not enough."
This week's Writerland launches an exploration and we hope conversation about ambition -- its virtues and its perils.
* * *
We all know that the journalism world can be punishing. There aren't enough jobs to go around, success is never, ever guaranteed and the burnout is very real, especially right now. Sometimes, it feels like we’re dropping like flies.
Of course, not everyone is struggling. Successful journalists exist. I think many of us look at them and try to crack the code, to figure out how they “made it.” Everyone’s journey is different but sometimes I feel like the ones who are thriving have a kind of ambition and drive that I’ll simply never be able to match.
In a career as thankless as journalism can be, you must have a good deal of ambition to keep going. But I don’t always have a lot of that. I certainly think about my future and about the things I would like to accomplish in the long term but I’m not really doing much about it short term. I have hopes and dreams just like everyone else but the motivation isn't always there, no matter how much I remind myself that opportunities are never going to just fall into my lap. There’s no five-year plan or goals I’ve set for myself to check off. In many ways, this is due to the pandemic. The world changed so much after March 2020 that it often feels silly to plan any further ahead than a couple months.
Still, I wonder if having an abundance of ambition can sometimes come down to privilege. People always say that you can do anything you set your mind to, and you either believe it or you don’t. I suspect this might be easier to believe if you’ve grown up seeing people who look like you constantly succeed.
I didn’t have that growing up. My people weren’t writing the books we read in class, they weren’t used as examples of success or inspiration. Like many others, I was taught from a young age that if I succeeded it would be because I was the exception, not the norm. Nurturing ambition for yourself and your career can be difficult when you have to conserve all your energy just to get your foot in the door, when there’s been a constant lack of support in the schools you’ve attended and the jobs you’ve held.
But unless you get incredibly lucky or are very well connected, you need motivation in order to keep going in journalism. That is getting harder, especially when there is so much else to worry about like money and mental health and the fact that every day feels like you’re waking up to a harsher, crueler world.
I relate ambition to struggle. Society tells us that if you have ambition, if you have that drive to succeed, you can make it through all the challenges, all the rough times. Today though, many people have had enough. They don’t want to struggle through work with bad pay and high stress and problematic management. Our world puts so much importance on jobs, on working to live, on getting this great sense of fulfillment from work and that mindset is finally getting some well deserved backlash.
I think the journalism world needs to do better at addressing the issues young journalists are faced with today because otherwise people will keep leaving. On that note actually, we need to make people feel more comfortable about potentially leaving the field. I feel like some journalists, especially those from older generations, tend to look down on you if you decide to leave, like you’ve failed in some way. But that just makes people less willing to seek out advice and talk about what it is they're actually feeling. No one that I know of goes into this field thinking it’s going to be easy. We all know it’s hard and we chose to do it anyway.
It does often feel like so many of us judge others for “selling out.” But many are “selling out” because there aren't other options. The backlash to the journalists who were recently laid off at “Tudum,” Netflix’s sister site, was appalling to me. This was a publication that recruited experienced, talented journalists, mostly women of color, by promising them decent pay for once. Why did some journalists then feel the need to say they would never have worked there to begin with? Having this air of superiority simply because you can afford to work somewhere reputable with subpar pay is not a good look.
It’s okay to choose a different career path. It’s okay to work odd jobs that have nothing to do with journalism. It’s okay to not always feel this great motivation to do everything all at once. Remember that all the people you have career envy about probably have career envy about someone else. No one is safe from insecurity. Take older journalists' career advice with a grain of salt – you are trying to get started in a different world with different rules.
Maybe ambition is really all we have in journalism if we want to go far and have no connections, and those who can sustain those feelings can go further. But this is not an equal opportunity world. Some people are supported and listened to while others are not. It makes me sad to think of the immense talent we are missing out on because we didn’t help nurture it. But we can’t all afford to work a 40k a year job at Harper’s. We can’t all afford to work hard and wait our turn.
* * *
We’d like to invite you to share your memories and reflections about ambition in your writing life. This chapter of Writerland is its sixtieth and as the newsletter’s audience continues to grow we are eager to include the voices of our readers, to make Writerland more than a newsletter, but a community.
We invite you to share you stories by emailing us at delacortereview@gmail.com
* * *
Nothing good ever came from writers punishing themselves. We know writing is hard. We’re here to show that it doesn’t have to be torture. Writerland, The Delacorte Review Newsletter comes out every other week. Subscribe to get full access to the newsletter and website. Never miss an update.