There was a once upon a time, back in the foggy days of my early childhood when I eagerly wrote stories for myself and a small audience of my parents, friends and teachers.

Yet there were more than two decades bookending the last time I wrote anything for the gee whiz fun of it all and when I finally picked up the pen to compose whimsy once again.

Back when I was around five, and up until around the time I was eight, I wanted to be a writer. I’m not sure I wanted to be a writer as a profession. At least not exclusively. I just wanted it to be one of the many things I did, in between being a fireman, astronaut and super hero.

But even if I wasn’t willing to grant exclusivity, I understood the magic of writing at a primitive level; the ability to create something from nothing, like a magician, but with pages and ink instead of smoke and mirrors.

Before I was born, my mom worked as a secretary at TRW. In her previous life at the office, she could type about eighty words per minute on her IBM Selectric. Though there was rarely a need to use it, we had an electric typewriter from Sears which we kept in a high shelf in a rarely explored closet. The typewriter probably weighed about as much as I did, with a black snake coiling from the body of the behemoth and into the wall. When you flipped the switch, there was a powerful hum which vibrated at a volume which was only a whisper less than a generator.

I remember my mother feeding the beast with a sheet of pure white paper, then marring its innocence with ink at a speed that amazed me.

Clickity-clackity-clickity-clackity-clickity-clackity-clickity-clackity-clickity-clackity-clickity-clackity-DING!

She’d type for half a page or so, then rip the sheet from the mouth of the monster. A few times, stories were delivered at the other end of her display. These stories were simple, and though I remember none specifically, I’m sure they were parables about little boys who should have better manners at the dinner table, or perhaps show more kindness toward their younger sister.

One day, my father brought home a manual typewriter, also from Sears. It had the same beige, hard plastic cover. But under the hood there were more differences than just the dimensions. The manual had no cord and no current. The ribbon was dirty and got all over your fingers, smudging the white of the paper before you even fed it. There was no fancy backspace key which would allow you to erase your mistakes.

None of that mattered. The typewriter was mine, and my daddy said I could use it whenever I wanted.

Clackity…click-click…Clackity…click-click…Clackity…click-click…Clackity…click-click…Clackity…DING!

I started writing that day. Most of my early work was about robots, space, and probably He-Man, though I do remember one story featuring Spiderman in an epic battle with a monster snowman. Living in Southern California had lent snow a rather mystical quality to my eyes.

Though I’m sure each new story was every bit as horrible as the one which preceded it, I was five years old at the time and my parents seemed impressed. That was all that mattered to me. Same went for school. Though I always enjoyed writing amid the clickety clackety dings of the typewriter most, I often scribbled my stories at school as well. Whether they were humoring me or not I will never know, but the teachers seemed to enjoy them and regularly asked me to share.

Though I was kindergarten age, I was not in kindergarten. My parents had enrolled me in a school where they slipped books into my hands so early, I have no memory of ever learning to read them. The neighborhood school we were supposed to attend was an atrocity. My oldest sister went there, at least until the day one of the teachers told my father in a conference that “some kids are destined for mediocrity,” and “everyone would be a lot happier if they accepted this truth early on.”

The school was a mile and a half from our house. Still, had the rest of us been home, we would’ve probably been able to hear our father’s anger echoing across the campus hallways.

That was all my parents needed to pull my sister, now the senior nurse in her city’s largest hospital, from campus and enroll her in a private school just beyond our means. My other two sisters and I immediately followed. The school was small, owned by the same people who owned the preschool I’d been attending since I was two. The tuition was significantly less than a typical private school, but my family was by no means wealthy. The tuition eventually drifted from difficult to inconceivable, at which point my sister and I migrated to the best public school our parents could manage.

Even if the report cards said something different, the private school had no grades. Instead, students were encouraged to continually reach for the next rung of their ability. It was one of the biggest shocks of my life, moving from a school where my brain was given breath, to one where I was bored out of my skull, day upon day, in a never ending purgatory of doldrums and deja vu. Oz to Kansas it was.

In my old school, I would finish my work and then be offered a choice: I could either read, or write.

In my new school, I would finish my work and then be offered a choice: I could either sit and stare at the wall, or sit and lay with my head on the desk.

On the few occasions when I did manage to write a story, the teachers didn’t care. At least not like I remembered my old teachers caring. How could they, with thirty-five other students all clamoring for the same slice of validation?

I’m not exactly sure why I allowed the death of the writing spirit at school to follow me home, but like a wayward puppy it did. I was eight when I changed schools for the first time. Shortly after that, the manual typewriter was placed back on a high shelf and I never felt my fingers on the keys again.

It would be more than twenty years before I would write another story.

It is possible, my abandonment of the pen had nothing to do with my change in schools. It was also at that age when I discovered Stephen King and my world of words forever changed. Before I read The Talisman, stories seemed simple. I could mimic them in my own primitive way. After The Talisman I was content to go along for the ride as often as I could.

Exercise: Did you ever make up stories or draw pictures as a child? Were you encouraged or discouraged, and how did that attention make you feel? What sorts of things would you create? Don’t be embarrassed. Pretend you are that age right now, and write a story to impress your mom or dad.

Sean Platt is an author of books about life and professional ghostwriter.

You are a writer.

It makes no difference whether you plan to pick up your pen for the first time tomorrow, or whether you have been clutching it tightly for many years already; a woman is no less a mother when her milk first begins to flow.

Writing is the music you make for a dance of your design; the legacy you will one day leave of the life you once lived. Writers write for different reasons. Some of us write because there are stories inside us we long to tell, people we wish to impress or maybe products we’d like to sell.

You may have a single reason or a hundred. I could never narrow mine down.

Maybe you are a writer because you know it is a sterling affair, each of those moments when you find the sound of swirling syllables speaking from a symphony born in your private abyss; a tangle of thought unraveled upon the page revealing the inner you, then placing it on display for the reader as you stand back both bashful and proud.

Perhaps you are a writer because you mourn the brevity of our existence and are selfish enough to wish you might live through the best of your moments more than once.

You may not know why you are a writer, but that’s okay. The important thing is to know you are.

Though no one needs a blessing to consider themselves a writer, many people have kept themselves prisoner of anemic thoughts and limiting preconceptions. If you are searching for permission, here you go – POOF! – you’re now a writer.

You may now inhabit more than a single existence. One life fixed firmly in the reality that swims before you, the other quietly observing all the versions which wait in your mind’s eye, eager to reveal their own romantic record of yesterday.

Get comfortable. Allow the knowledge that you are a writer to settle in your senses. Ponder where it might lead. What worlds will you create and who will your mind manufacture to fill them?

Because you are a writer, imagination is your only horizon.

For the dozen years preceding my life with a pen, I made my living buying and selling flowers. Perhaps it was there where I first learned to manipulate beauty; there where I discovered I could take something which was already beautiful, and shape it into something breathtaking. I found my favorite flowers, combined them with colors that echoed, and discovered that nature herself was only offering suggestion.

What works with flowers, works with words as well. You can write like that; words in a sentence like flowers in a bouquet. Language is color and there are few limits to its use. The more you use it, the more natural it will be.

Primary colors coalesce for the rainbow, yet the remaining hues paint the world which lies beneath. Paint your life with the tip of a pen or stroke of a key, rinse your memory in vivid color, and carve a future from the worlds you create.

You are a writer. Messy the desktop with your thoughts and pull the best from inside you.

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I’m a writer. I spent over three decades unaware of this essential truth, but I’m ready to atone for my ignorance.

For some reason, it never mattered that I’d been reading at least a book a week since my eyes could string the syllables together.

I could never be a writer.

Writing, I believed, was a spectator sport. At least for me. I imagined the process as long, tedious, and certainly not something I was capable of. I pictured the lone man, tugging on his beard and banging on his typewriter; a single swallow left in a tumbler on the table, waiting as reward once the long thread of inspiration had been finally and fully pulled from his mind.

That’s not me. I’m not creative.

This was the constant whisper of a lifetime. Omnipresent and no more irrefutable than, “I cannot fly.”

I wish I knew the moment this changed, but becoming a writer has been less like the bloom of childbirth, than the process of pregnancy.

The first draft of the first novel I ever tried to write was a spewing of words, spilled in a four month stretch of unbroken afternoons. My wife told me with a wink that I should perhaps move to one of the quiet rooms in the house and try my hand at writing. These quiet rooms, of course, were only quiet because I was not in them. Really, it was her nice way of saying, “You have far too much to say, dear, why don’t you try saying it to yourself for a change?”

And so I did.

My wife is often right and her timing was good. Though she had been saying the same thing on and off for ten straight years, this final time I also happened to be harboring a deep, sudden ache that I didn’t quite know how to soothe.

For the three years prior, I’d spent every day with both my children. Quite suddenly and as if from nowhere, September came to steal August, and smuggled my daughter along with it. In a blink, my oldest child had left for Kindergarten and my son wasn’t far behind. Because I was not yet a writer, I did not yet know the intimate relationship which can exist between ink and tears.

My daughter went off to school and I went to my den (a lawn chair in the attic) and closed the door behind me. With no one but the walls to hear my rambles, the room remained still. There was silence for a while. Perhaps some birds outside, singing beside the bougainvillea covered window; every so often a siren in the distance, and around lunch time the call of the door-to-door tamale lady who has been a fixture of my neighborhood since long before I moved in. Then, finally, the tapping of keys.

Once I started I didn’t stop. Well, that’s not exactly true. I still ate and drank and played with my children; went for walks and, if I remember correctly, was a little extra friendly with my wife. But I was a writer, just like that. I had started a story with a single sentence, then returned each day to see how far I could stretch it.

I started in mid-September and promised myself I wouldn’t stop before I had finished the manuscript. Every day, I gave the story more of my voice. Then, one week before the end of the year, I stood at the printer with shaking knees as 600 pages fell into a neat pile at the bottom of the tray. The pages were still warm as I ran my fingers across the top.

Please don’t read this with the mistaken impression that this first manuscript was by any means good. It wasn’t. But, as Dr. Suess said, “Everything stinks until it’s finished.”

The first person I shared the draft with, besides my wife, affectionately referred to the book as a narrative disaster. Fortunately, she also told me there were passages which displayed a surprising amount of promise, and that writing was definitely something I should pursue. You can’t stretch your tee-shirt a week after you start lifting weights, and I was far from turning into Shakespeare overnight. I knew I needed practice, yet that compliment, given to me by a veteran English Professor, was all I needed.

Of course she also told me there was plenty of hard work ahead , that writing wasn’t easy, and that the waiting road was long and bumpy, but none of that mattered. I had discovered I was a writer and that meant everything. I didn’t care that my novel needed tons of work, or that it might be entirely unusable. I could write another. I’d finished one manuscript and knew I could do it again.

This confidence came from nowhere and maybe added an inch to my height. That is one of the most extraordinary things about being a writer – the constant sense of self discovery. Going to the desk each day is a delight, a new opportunity to get another glimpse inside yourself. Dig deep enough and you will inevitably draw closer to the core of who you are.

You create people, then fill them with personalities. You put words in their mouths and then make them deliver their lines exactly as you say. It is your job as author to make the characters of your creation react to situations that are horrible or magical, or normal every day, which can themselves be a bit horrible or magical, or perhaps a bit of both.

This discovery is true for all types of writers, so long as they’re willing to push their thoughts past the surface. A copywriter, for example, must understand human psychology if they are to do their best work. Understanding others sometimes may start or end with a clearer understanding of yourself, but the epiphany’s always there if you’re paying attention.

It was in the first few months of my own reflection, when I stumbled on something that I believe to be an essential truth about writers in general.

Writers are not special, at least not any more so than any other group of people. This doesn’t mean that all writers are created equal, or that anyone who decides to sit down and record their brain brew can become a Hemingway or King, but it does mean that if a person can capture their most natural voice, then work to continually refine it until they are eventually able to manipulate the written word as fluidly as they could in a verbal exchange, then they can consider themselves a writer.

Good for us. The gifts of a writer have never held more power. These days, being a wordsmith means you have the tools to unlock a higher percentage of the world’s potential.

You don’t have to be a brilliant writer, nor do you need the skills to pen page turning fiction. A good writer sees open doors down every hallway and clearly understands how to deliver ideas in text. I’m not a writer because I went to college (I didn’t, not for more than an hour or ten anyway) or because I’ve been anointed by the huddled overlords of the plume. I am a writer because I have a beating heart, an active mind, and the curiosity to see where they might conspire to take me.

I have language, so I can speak. I can speak, so I can tell a story. I can tell a story, so I can write.

It truly is that simple.

People have longed for stories since they were painting them inside their caves. It is this desire that has stoked The Illiad and The Odyssey for so long. And it isn’t just belief in God that has kept the bible breathing.

It’s the stories.

After I finished my first story, I wrote my next million or so words in a blur. Within a year, I had traded in my old life for a new one as a full time writer. I launched a blog, then a business, and then my first book.

It’s not the life I expected, but it is what I was born to do.

Before I started writing, I always believed that I wasn’t especially creative, or that at least what creativity I did have, didn’t run too deep. But I’m alive, and that means I know a good story when I hear one. A writer need not worry that their ideas will thin. Our minds only empty at the end of our final breath.

Writing well is a lot of work, and you’ll spend a lot of time in the edit if you truly want your words to sing, but the only way to be a writer is to sit down and start moving your pen across the paper (or your fingers across the keys), fueled by the knowledge that you have everything it takes.

You are alive, so yes, you are a writer.

Note: Fragments of this piece were gathered from an original post I wrote on Copyblogger last year.

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Exercise: What are your preconceptions of being a writer? Do you have a pre-defined image of what being a writer means? Has that image been holding you back? Take 15 minutes and write down your thoughts about what it means to be a writer, then follow it with another 15 minutes seeing where your original thoughts take you.

Have I ever told you I love to write?

I mean I really, really LOVE it.

Then why don’t you marry it?

Well, I sort of did.

Over the last year, I’ve written more than a million words. As soon as the paid work is sent off, my muse gets quite a bit of my fawning attention. Fortunately, Cindy’s okay with me falling in love over and over, so long as it’s never with the siren song of another woman.

Though I’ve spent hours (and hours) of every day curving my thought into copy, it is not a daily alchemy I ever expected to have in my life. Were I to travel back a few years and speak with a Sean who was not yet wearing the few sudden strands of silver which have sprouted here and there throughout my otherwise dark thatch of chestnut hair, and tell him that he would one day start writing and never stop, he’d probably look me in the eye, laugh his smug little snigger, and maybe say something like, “Sure thing Pinocchio. I’ll write a book right after I finish my next triathlon.”

It’s true. I never saw it coming. Now that it’s here I wonder how I ever lived without it.

There is something wonderfully self-indulgent about writing. People willingly part with hundreds of dollars per hour for the chance to lie on a couch and unleash their demons. Yet the honest writer has the fortune to see their reflection staring back from every ink filled page.

“Writing became such a process of discovery that I couldn’t wait to get to work in the morning:  I wanted to know what I was going to say.”  That quote, by Sharon O’Brien says it perfectly. Whether I’m writing fiction with my partner, copy for my clients, or stories for my children, paying attention to what I’m saying and how I’m saying it, allows me to know a little more about myself each day.

In the last year I have realized that the more I know about myself as a writer, the more I know about myself as a person.

The more I know about myself as a person, the better husband, father and friend I can be.

Life’s Better With the Right Words…

I’m only here a short while. No matter how hard I might claw at the inevitable, one day I will be gone. POOF, just like that. It could be a slow and lingering departure, or as sudden as a changing wind. Either way, as sure as water’s wet, I’ll be gone. Who I am affects how much I can do in the time that I am here. Clarity of voice will lead to clarity of purpose, sharpening the tools I need to be a better man and raise better children, who will then be more equipped to be the best citizens of the world that they can possibly be.

The tagline chosen for Writer Dad over a year ago was decided without much thought. It was simply my favorite from the three I thought up one Sunday afternoon. It is wonderfully fitting, though. And a year later, I find it beautifully true.

The words we use are important, essential to who we are and how we assemble our thoughts. As I’ve been digging deep into the language of my own life – the language that has led me toward this particular today and impending tomorrow, I’ve stumbled across many stories that I would love to share. These are the stories that helped to make me who I am. They are, I am sure, similar in many ways to stories you have yourself. My tales have different settings and a different cast, but like yours, they are the aggregate of what made me who I am today, and eventually, what turned me into a writer.

Life is better with the right words. I appreciate you letting me share mine with you.

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