Becoming a Writer

Becoming a writer is easy. Staying with that decision requires years of dedication and a lot of hard work. Becoming a successful writer… well that requires even more work, and depends upon your definition of success.

When I was sixteen, one of the first things I did when I got my driver’s license was to drive to the University of Windsor to meet W.O. Mitchell, who was then the writer in residence. I went to see him with only one purpose: to ask for any advice he might have about becoming a writer. His advice was memorable.  “Don’t,” he said.

Writing, W.O. Mitchell warned, has the longest apprenticeship of any career – about 30 years, if I recall our conversation correctly. Now he wasn’t talking about blogs, or writing technical manuals or newspaper articles. He was talking about writing.

There is a difference between people who write, and people who are writers, just as there is a difference between people who paint and artists.

There are some wonderful books written by people who are, by their own admission, not really writers at all. But we’re not talking about them. We’re talking about writers.

What I mean by a writer…

You could say it is something in the blood, quite like a virus that strikes us, usually at an early age. It is a love for words, and a desire to master the subtle nuances of language, but it is more than this. It is a desire to communicate one’s ideas and ideals, our perspective on the world, ourselves, and the people around us, even before we fully understand our own thoughts of these things. It is a love of adventure, even if these adventures never take us physically beyond our keyboard. It is a lifelong endeavor, a type of alchemy, where we actively participate in our thoughts and perceptions, reorganize them, distill them, write them down, rewrite them, and through this process produce something from ourselves that enriches us through the process and through that process, create in ourselves something new, making us better than what we were.

On becoming a writer…

Becoming a writer can be a difficult life. We need to participate fully in our life experiences, participate in the world around us, and then withdraw, like a recluse to a solitary place where we can process these experiences and, from them, create something new, something richer than the experience itself.

Becoming a writer requires a lifelong commitment, something to be practiced daily, or nearly so.

It will influence all of your most important decisions. It will have an effect on your decision on where to live; whether or not you should stay in school to get that degree; on your decision to marry and to have children; whether or not to travel. All these decisions, and many more will be influenced by the importance of your writing. A new car, or even a new couch, will be weighed against how much you will need to earn to afford it, and how much time this will take you away from your writing.

No matter how good you are at your day job, becoming a writer will eventually mean having to choose between that job and your writing. When you speak of your “work”,  you will often have to explain that it is not your job you’re talking about.

Becoming a writer will be hard on your ego. A decade of minimal success, or no success at all, can quickly go by. Your friends and siblings will have established careers, and all the physical signs of success, while you may still be struggling to pay the bills. You will doubt yourself. I can tell you from personal experience that landing your first $2 million sales contract is a helluva lot easier than getting your first poem accepted in a literary magazine. But our society gives far more esteem to that first type of success than the second. And the financial rewards are magnified a couple hundred thousand times over.*

Becoming a writer will cause friction between you and your family. No matter how much they love you, or respect you, it is unlikely they will be able to understand the choices you need to make.

It will probably cost you relationships. Believe it or not, most people do not turn on the light and reach for a notebook after love making. Not everyone can accept that. If they can accept that in the early months, that does not guarantee they can accept it three or four years into the relationship.

For me, there could not have been any other choice, and I certainly would not want to change a thing. However, at the same time, becoming a writer is not a life I would wish upon anyone. I have not spent much time here talking about the benefits of becoming a writer. If you have read this far, you already know what those are, and my hope is that you are already writing about that.

*For my thoughts on defining success for your own life, you might want to look at my articles on how to be a success.

You might also be interested in my latest article on jobs for writers.

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