Reader Question: I noticed you went to school for English. I was wondering if you think your degree helped you to become a writer?

I always knew that I wanted to study English at university. I chose it because it’s actually the only subject I ever excelled at in school. Looking back at my tuition debt of £17,000 now and the 6 hours of contact time I had each week, I still struggle to decide whether that was a good enough reason for deciding to study English.

Three years of reading English literature, critical theory texts, writing long essays and short stories and film analysis for my English degree certainly improved my writing, no doubt about it. But would my writing have improved just as much if I’d studied a different humanities subject? If I’d taken a degree in history, philosophy, sociology, and so on? Yes, it probably would. All of those writing and analytical skills are completely transferable and certainly aren’t exclusively established through studying for an English degree.

Even after my degree, I had no idea what to do. I enjoyed writing, but I never dreamed that I might make any money out of it. There was a reasonably big gap between my graduation and my decision to start a travel blog and to pursue a career in writing. In a roundabout way, my English degree did help me to become a writer, but if you asked me to point to the single most important thing that got me to where I am now, I’d have a different answer.

My Travel Blog Helped Me Become a Writer

There’s one single thing that helped me begin a career as a writer more than anything else: writing my travel blog.

I wrote a film blog on and off while I was at university, but never really had enough time to dedicate to it. When Luke and I moved to Taiwan to teach, we started a small travel blog called Strangers in Taiwan. I wrote a lot. I wrote because it was hard being away from my family and I wanted to tell them about my new life abroad (and reassure them that I was safe!) I loved writing much more than teaching, but even then I didn’t believe it was a viable career option. After a while, people started reading Strangers in Taiwan. I never promoted the blog at all, so this was a complete shock for me.

When I finished my year as a teacher, I couldn’t bear the thought of another year of ESL teaching – but I also couldn’t bear the thought of not travelling. That’s when it occurred to me that, with the cost of living in Central America and Asia being so much lower than in Europe, maybe I could find a little writing work to help fund my travels. I decided to set up Charlie on Travel as a portfolio of my work and as a reason to practise my writing everyday. Anyone can start a blog as long as they have something to write about – it’s not an exclusive club. After a little while, I was lucky enough to secure my awesome job as an article writer for an online digital marketing company off the back of this blog.

Travel blogging my way around the world :)

My Teachers Helped Me Become a Writer

Another factor that influenced me to become a writer was a select few incredible teachers who encouraged me to believe that I could do it.

When I was seven years old, I had completely panicked about taking my first ever exams.  I didn’t know what it meant and I sure didn’t know what I was supposed to be writing. My teacher started handing back the papers after the exam, telling the class they needed to use their imaginations to write more exciting stories. He started reading an example story out loud, and after a few sentences I realised it was mine.

Things went on in this way for some years. Every time my writing was read aloud I was surprised, I never began to expect it. Once I won a school poetry competition that I didn’t enter. My teacher had entered one of the poems from my folder on my behalf. When I was sixteen, that same teacher caught me in the corridor and asked what universities I was going to apply to. I was dumbstruck. No one in my family had ever been to university and it hadn’t even occurred to me as something that I would be capable of doing. As I struggled to find some words, he said: “I hope that the University of Oxford will be on your applications list,” and walked on down the corridor.

Without these teachers, I don’t think I would ever have had the confidence to apply for university, let alone to become a writer.

Here’s me being shy. I didn’t get into Oxford by the way; I did have an interview though, where I acted a lot like this.

Not Being Limited by Others Helped Me Become a Writer

As well as listening to the people who say that you can do it, you have to stop listening to those who tell you that you can’t. I always wanted to be a writer. I asked people how I would go about this and they said it was impossible, or near enough. I heard that writers always wrote a diary everyday before bed, that writers read all of the classics, and that a life as a writer was unfulfilling, characterised by rejection letters and editors who completely changed your work. Well, I never wrote a diary, I’ve always found Jane Austen to be the most tedious of writers, and actually I feel that my work as a writer is more fulfilling than any other work I’ve ever done, though I do sometimes get rejection emails and have editors ruin my work.

It took me a long time to realise that when people say something is impossible, it’s because they can’t imagine it, or because they simply don’t want to imagine it. You can’t let the limitations of other people’s imaginations hold you back. If you can imagine something is possible, then it is. There’s more than one route to becoming a writer and no one writer is the same as another, so don’t try to be.

True words on the John Lennon wall in Prague.

…but if I hadn’t studied English?

Even though it’s not the main factor I would attribute to helping me become a writer, would I be where I am now if I hadn’t studied English at degree level? Though I don’t like to look back and make too many guesses, I suspect that if I’d skipped university altogether, I probably would never have become a writer or a traveller. Most likely I would have a decently paid but totally unsatisfying job in PR, HR or marketing that I worked my way up into. Though my writing work is very modestly paid, I love it and wouldn’t trade it for anything else.

But does the fact that it was an English degree in particular affect how much it helped me as a writer? I reckon probably not, but it definitely wasn’t a bad decision either. There’s something to be said for just choosing to do what you love. Sure, studying engineering or accountancy will get you a crackingly well-paid job, but if it’s not what you love and money isn’t your priority, then what’s the point? An English degree was never going to be a one-way ticket to high paid employment, but it is versatile and there’s plenty you can do with what you learn from those three years.

My graduation class in 2012

Thank you for the question and I hope that this has gone some way to explaining what really contributed to helping me become a writer, both as a travel blogger and for my work.

If you have any questions that you would like to have answered, I’d super love to hear them! You can comment below, send me an email, or message me on any of my social media.