One of the questions that always stumped me on campus tours came from parents who, after learning I had self-designed a major in creative writing, would ask the inevitable and mostly innocuous follow-up, “So do you want to be a writer?”

This question was always difficult for me not because I didn’t know the answer (it was, and I suspect always will be a resounding YES! I do want to be a writer! I want to be the next JK Rowling and create a world that readers fall in love with and—less importantly—make more money than the Queen. I want that!). I was not ready to admit that answer. When I did answer their question in the affirmative, I was sometimes met with, “hmm, that’ll be difficult.”

For me, part of what makes a career in writing terrifying is not that it is a more difficult path, but that there is actually no path at all, or if there is it’s too amorphous to identify. You could work hard your entire life, have an incredible talent, and still die destitute and unrecognized. This is the kind of thing that fills me, the parents of Lena Dunham’s character on Girls, and probably those prospective students’ parents with utter terror.

Even so, I’m determined not to lose the motivation and momentum I built around writing. I don’t want to look back one day and refer to writing as something I used to do in college. For my senior thesis, I wrote historical fiction, so here in Bulgaria I’m trying my hand at travel writing. Now that I’ve passed the most volatile stages of culture shock, I feel I’m ready to finally write insightful, informative, possibly pithy, articles about living in Bulgaria, teaching English as a second language and international travel.

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My sophomore year, I took Writing 100 (Advanced Topics: Arts + Culture Review) with Professor Drake. Around spring break, we covered travel writing, and I found it was one of my favorite subjects in the course. I’ve loved the Travel Channel for as long as I can remember, eating pizza rolls after school in front of the TV and watching Samantha Brown.

I started submitting writing to publications this past year. In May, I won third place for my piece on Copenhagen in a student travel writing contest for Transitions Abroad. It was the first time I was paid for my writing in a non-Scripps context and it was empowering.

I was determined to do more travel writing when I got to Bulgaria, so I read Robin Hemley’s A Field Guide for Immersion Writing: Memoir, Journalism, and Travel. You can read my full review here. It was an informative read by someone who demonstrated himself to be an expert in the field. By the time I was done I had dozens of ideas percolating in my brain.

But I still didn’t feel like I had a direction. I didn’t know the next steps. So that’s why I bit the bullet and finally enrolled in Matador U’s online travel writing course. I’ve been reading the Matador Network’s helpful articles on writing, and so I’m excited to work through the course, which covers some topics that will be new to me, like a “publication mindset,” new media and SEO, and travel writing markets.

Wish me luck and persistence—I know I’ll need both!

Are you a writer? What kind of path are you building?