I Am a Writer

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.

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