I got some tough news for anyone out there who fancies themselves a writer: you gotta actually do some writing. It may sound obvious, perhaps a little judgy, but I intend it to be encouraging. Let me explain using myself as an example.
“Writer” has been part of my identity since my parents got me a journal when I was eight. I wrote in that sucker every day, faithfully recording the weird bugs I saw, which ninja turtle was the coolest (Donatello), and other pieces of information that will, I have no doubt, help the far-future beings who discover my journal comprehend humanity.
Because I wrote so much, school writing assignments came easy to me. I knew how to put together a sentence, how to make sentences flow, even how to form an argument. For the longest time, I assumed I was on track to become an author or screenwriter or something else writery.
Somewhere down the line, I stopped writing in a journal. I’m not sure why. Most if not all of my writing was for school: essays and the occasional short story for creative writing classes.
One day in a college fiction writing course, the instructor told the class something I’ll never forget: “No one in this class is going to be Virginia Woolf or James Joyce. I’m sorry, but you just aren’t. You don’t have the talent.”
I didn’t particularly like Virginia Woolf or James Joyce, but this hurt. For years I’ve wondered why he said this to us. Maybe he was trying to scare away anyone who wasn’t serious about writing. Or maybe he wanted us to prove him wrong.
I came out of this thinking that to be a writer, you needed to write. You craved writing. You had to be scribbling at every possible moment. You had to be the Marquis de Sade, imprisoned for your writing, deprived of all possible writing implements yet still writing on the cell walls with your own feces. Well, I never felt compelled to write with feces: mine or anyone else’s. Does that mean I don’t really want to be a writer?
I thought that to write, I needed to be inspired. I needed to feel a white-hot genius beam straight from God’s beautiful mouth, powering me like a solar panel in eternal daylight to crank out the great American novel in a weekend.
Writing was nothing like that for me. Maybe I’d come up with a cool or interesting idea for a story, but when I’d try to execute it, I’d bail pretty quickly. My hard drive is littered with abandoned drafts of novels, short stories, and screenplays.
Now I’m deep in my thirties. I’ve put together a solid career as an editor and ghostwriter, but I’m not technically a novelist in my own right, which is what I assumed I’d be when I was scribbling in that journal as a kid. Still, the dream remains alive.
As with many folks, the pandemic got me thinking about what I really want to do and be. About eighteen months ago, I realized I needed to stop assuming I would be a novelist and actually work toward becoming one. So I did something I hadn’t really done before: instead of waiting for an idea to come to me, I forced an idea to come. I started brainstorming ideas and concepts that were important or interesting to me.
Behold my staggering genius.
Maybe 1 percent of the nonsense I jotted down was worthy of being pulled into a list titled “ideas to not immediately throw away.” Soon the ideas became characters, settings, plot points, themes, etc. Once I reached a critical mass of ideas, I started on the narrative and worked every day—usually as early as possible, so I was less likely to weasel out of it. Some days I’d write a whole chapter. Some days I’d write a whole sentence. And now my novel stands at about ninety thousand words, a perfectly acceptable length, and I’m about halfway through draft number two.
It hasn’t all been easy: in fact, it’s mostly been hard. I’m sorry to report that I am yet to see or feel any sort of God beam. I’m still a few drafts, months, and rejection letters away from being a novelist, but for the first time I feel like I’m on my way. Instead of eighteen months of intentions to write a novel, I have a manuscript. Some of it (most of it?) is bad, but it’s been steadily improving, and I expect to be reasonably happy with it by the time I reach the end of draft three.
I suppose the moral of the story is that becoming a writer—or painter, or filmmaker, or woodworker, or whatever you want to be—isn’t inevitable. But it’s not unreachable either. The simple truth is that you gotta actually do the thing you wanna do to be the thing you wanna be, even if it’s hard. Writing my novel has been hard. Even writing this silly, low-stakes blog post is hard. But I’m actually doing these things, perhaps sucking at them a little, but I trust my efforts will lead to better things later on.
So, yeah. Maybe I should have waited to be an NYT best seller before writing this post so I could really juice up the inspiration. Or maybe it’s more inspiring to see a snapshot from a fellow wannabe. In any case, I hope something here compels you to get cracking on that project today.