I’ve wanted to be a writer—specifically, a novelist—ever since my high-school English teacher said something like, “you’re good at writing, you should be a writer,” which introduced me to the possibility it’s a thing I could do.
That was half my life ago, and as yet no novels exist to my name. I’m working on it, now, more seriously than ever before. Okay, fine. Why blog about it?
Because what I want as a person learning to be a professional novelist is not more advice on how to write—because I’m buried under a heap of it even as I type this, send help—but a glimpse of what it looks like for someone to do this, to struggle against the forces, almost entirely internal, which make “being a writer” so difficult.
And if what I just described doesn’t exist, I’m gonna make it exist, because that’s what being a creative type is all about, dammit. I’m writing about the journey. Not because what I did yesterday or today or tomorrow is so interesting for its own sake. But because, hopefully, someday I can point to this pile and say, there. You want to know what it was like for me to become a writer? That’s what it was like. And it won’t be the same for you, but there’s at least one thing in that pile you can relate to.
Why’s it so hard to do this thing we all believe deep in our fervent little hearts we truly want to do? Let’s find out.
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