Re: Should I Apply For Job As A Writer?
Mood:  sharp
Now Playing: "Those Were the Days"
Topic: In Reply
Trading credentials, I am a retired Vocational Rehabilitation Counselor/Teacher. Since retiring I have also earned my MS in English as a technical writer. So it's probably fair to think you might take what I say with two grains of salt at least.

If you are asking whether or not you should apply for the job, you probably don't need to bother. And with your experience and wisdom I think you already know that. The jobs we get are the jobs we can picture ourselves doing; the jobs we already own where the application process is just paper work. When you picture yourself working with people like SYT you want to throw up. When you consider yourself putting your all into a field that has deteriorated into sound bites of thirty seconds or less and mind bites of single syllable simplicity you dissolve into hopeless wailing. If the job opening is anywhere within a hundred miles of the type of writing SYT represents run away, run away, and be afraid. Be very Afraid.

That said, what then do you do? I see two options immediately at hand. You can either change your self-image until you squeeze down into the present-day version of a writer, and then go for it. Or you can keep looking for that needle-in-a-haystack publication where real writers still write, and present yourself to them with pride and expectation. Ah, another option just fluttered by. You could do both, second option first. I read more books than periodicals, but what I read tells me that the New Yorker isn't the New Yorker any longer and that the art of writing has all but become road kill on the side of the Information Highway. I fear you are going to have to make some value adjustments down, way down, before you can snuggle into a place in the pages comfortably. But I could be wrong.

Analysis aside, apply for the job. Bob Dylan once said, "When you ain't got nothin' you've got nothin' to lose." Miracles still happen. It could be a match after all.