On Becoming a Writer

Being a writer is being a different breed of a person. However, I definitely cannot see most people who say they are a writer and take them seriously. Most people would like to think they are indeed a writer, a forger of worlds, a weaver of souls of various characters – but they most assuredly are not.

A lot of people just say it for the shock value. As some great sign of how deep of a person they are, how far their soul delves in the good ol’ intellectual spirit. Most of these people are idiots.

Now some real writers are also idiots, so being a writer doesn’t exactly make you smart. Yet being a true writer does make you a very different person from the norm.

One thing is for certain, you are far more creative than the majority of people. Ideas pop into your mind all the time. Stories, settings, backgrounds, people you never met that urge you to write about them, or desperately plea with you to give them life.

And of course you oblige, you offer these poor souls a devil’s bargain. For a fee you will bring them to life, but you will only give them life within the constraints of the pages that you put ink to, forever entrapped and entombed with eternal life between the binds of a book.

This whole process to me is amazingly beautiful.

I have created characters, and this may sound insane, that make me feel like they are more realistic than some of my actual real life friends. It is when you no longer accept a character you have created as a character but rather a real person that you know you did something very interesting.

Another note of observation that I have noticed with writers, is that we tend to observe a lot more things in our surroundings.

I am not saying we are more detail-oriented, because I could miss a painted elephant on brick wall just by walking by it, seriously I am horrible with details. What I am good at though, is seeing the overall picture of things. I can read in between the lines, and this inherent natural ability to do so I believe is truly part of the writer nature.

After all, I sincerely doubt that the majority of writers thought about tropes, themes, theories, and symbolism as they wrote the majority of their pieces of fiction. However, all these things are there in plenty.

I remember in 10th grade English when I learned about the idea of symbolism. It blew me away. I never even had a conscious thought of it. It stressed me out as I thought about my masterpiece, about how stupid it must be since I didn’t know anything about symbolism.

It was only a couple of weeks later, looking at my beloved story, that I realized the symbolism had been there all along. It opened up my story in a plethora of new and fascinating ways that I never thought existed. Yet naturally, untrained, I put those very same symbols in there to be found by those with eyes to see.

In so many ways I believe a writer is a natural-born gift that belongs to the creative.

However, all these things can be learned too I believe. As I still think every single person has it in them to write a book about something. It does not mean that their book will necessarily be good of course alas!

The biggest thing I could tell anyone who really wants to become a writer is to look at themselves, look deep into themselves and ask questions. Challenge all your beliefs, become all too familiar as to why you have those beliefs, be honest with yourself too. For these complex inner dialogues can give you a great insight into characters you come up with, even if you never answer the reader as to why your characters believe in what they do, you will know and be able to detail all their actions with the answer.

Along with this, look at writing as a rushing river battling against the hard wrought walls of a dam.

Every time I view my skill growing as a writer, I look at more water being added to that river, more pressure being applied against that dam. Then one day that dam comes crashing down and the river bursts through in a magnificent sudden and powerful roar.

It whistles and roars and screams down the valley and floods the land with its might.

That is, until it reaches another dam!

Then it is back to adding more water and pressure slowly to break away at that barrier.

That is how it always has been for me. Small little increases in improvement, whether it be grammar, character building, story, symbols or what have you. Eventually all these small little improvements create a monumental storm that brings forth a great epiphany.

And that epiphany is what makes it worthwhile.

My two most notable improvements in my writing is when I learned about symbolism in 10th grade, and then again in 12th grade when I learned about being able to read in between the lines in a novel. In other words I could see what was going on in the background even though the author never actually physically said what was happening.

Writing is a constantly evolving skill, the more you do it, the better you will get.

If you wish to become a writer, remember to practice constantly at writing stories.

For every ten shitty stores I write, I come up with at least one gem. (For poems, I create a lot more shitty poems than ever a gem haha).

Never give up, and keep striving and growing your creativity. And one day as you look back on yourself, you will noticed, you too have become an outsider to this world, an observer of its deeper places, and realize you have become a writer in true.