“What do you want to be?” I remember being asked this question as a young child and being overwhelmed with the possibilities and choices that lay ahead of me. Did I want to be a firefighter, a marine biologist like my hero Jeremy Wade, follow in my father’s footsteps and go into accounting, or do something else entirely with my life. Now, 22 years old and at the end of my Bachelor’s, I think I have that answer. I want to be a writer. Admittedly, that does not narrow things down as much as would be useful, and certainly requires me to be attentive and purposeful for where I put my efforts. Yet, for all the things that bring me joy in life, the simple act of creation I partake in when putting pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard are second to none. But I am still young and have so much I have to know before I am ready, which made my time at Bymygo so valuable to me in what I learned about what it means to be a writer.
However, being young does not mean I am inexperienced. I am experienced in speech writing, fiction writing, editorial writing, article writing, and even academic writing, even though I have to intentionally kill any style or personality that goes into the latter. I have had practice, and enjoy the practice of refining my skills. Yet, I had never had the opportunity to practice script writing before my internship at Bymygo. The thing that stands out to me most about script writing is that it is a far more collaborative process than anything else I had written before. Although editorial writing certainly requires cooperation with other people, script writing for Bymygo presented a new experience where collaboration and cooperation were necessary components from the very beginning.
This certainly presented some challenges I had not yet faced in my other forms of writing, and I would be lying if I said that everything had gone smooth right from the start. I nevertheless took these uncertainties in my stride and saw it as a chance to improve upon my skills as a writer, and to dabble in something I had always found excuses to not do beforehand. And I feel as if I have been made a better and more able writer because of it and what I was able to learn. Even though I will need more time before I am willing to call myself a writer, my time at Bymygo and my internship there have made the question of “What do you want to be?”, that much simpler to answer. I am going to be a writer.
by Aidan O’Reilly