Write.
Here’s the thing: I often get people asking me how I became a writer and most of the time I start gearing up to talk about finding markets to publish stories or how to write a professional cover letter. But then it turns out, that’s not what they want to know, they’re still just toying with the idea of becoming a writer. They haven’t written anything yet, or at least, not much. Or maybe they used to write as a kid but they haven’t in years. That last one comes up a startling amount, leaving me to wonder if we really do set aside our imaginations when we grow up like all those Christmas movies would have us believe.
The good news is, you don’t have to believe in magic to become a writer. All you have to do is write. This won’t necessarily make you a published writer, let alone a famous best-selling author, but if those kinds of dreams are the only reason you’re picking up the pen you might want to put it back down. I’m not saying it can’t or won’t happen, but since over a million books are published each year and only a handful make it to the best seller list, you may want to find some intrinsic motivation. You need something that will hold you through years of practice while you churn out your first million words of crap, and then through years of rejection letters as editor after editor sends you a cold, remote form letter.
A few years ago, just after I finished The Immortality Virus, as a matter of fact, I had an artistic crisis. I wasn’t sure I was supposed to be a writer. I had no ideas that excited me and I was disillusioned with the marketing end of the business. So I decided to stop writing for a year to see what would happen.
What happened is I didn’t make it a year. Aside from the fact that I kept going to the computer almost daily to play around, about three months into my year I was hit with a new idea that absolutely demanded I write it. It wouldn’t take no for an answer.
I’m not saying that you need to have an experience like that in order to become a writer. Nor am I saying that if you don’t currently write, you shouldn’t or aren’t meant to. In fact, plenty of artists are blocked for whatever reason and go through life never fully expressing their creativity. It may not even be through writing, it could be through art or music or creative cooking. Around the same time I had my writing earphone, I began to read and really use the ideas in a book by Julia Cameron, “The Artist’s Way.” If you’re not sure whether you should be a writer or not, you may want to give the book a try and see if it helps you sort out what kind of artist is buried within.
But in the end, the one-word cliché does hold true. I can’t promise you fame, I can’t promise you fortune, and I can’t even promise you talent (although practice helps), but I can promise you that if you write, you are a writer.