how I (actually) became a writer

Step 1: Decided to be a novelist (age unknown)

Step 2: Spent high school world building, got nowhere, decided to go to college as an English Major so I could “learn how to write”

Step 3: Did not learn how to write. Did get to read some cool books I would never have read on my own, though.

Step 4: Graduated from college with broader horizons, but no more writing than I’d done in high school.

Step 5: Got a sucky job, played a lot of warcraft, dreamed about being a writer, wrote very little.

Step 6: Read the following quote by Hemingway:

Those who say they want to be writers, and aren’t writing, don’t.

Step 7: Woke up.

That was really it, right there. I can actually remember the very moment, the actual second it happened. I was sitting at my desk at said crappy job wasting time on the internet until I could go home, and I stumbled across that quote on one of the many writing sites I used to haunt while I was “waiting for my chance to be a writer.” It truly was like waking up. I could suddenly see how stupid I’d been, how silly. Here I was, at a job where I got primarily got paid to surf the internet, no kids, no obligations, free time coming out my ears, and I was waiting? Sitting there, in my chair, letting the other secretary get the phone, I realized that all this time I was in love with the idea of being a writer, of having written, and not with writing itself, primarily because I had done so little of it.

So I changed. Right there, I changed. I set out a schedule for myself (short stories, this was before I knew I was bad at them) and a ten year plan. I was going to have my first book published by the time I was 24 (I was 22 at the time, ah youth), and I was going to be writing full time by the time I was 30. There was lots of other stuff I’ve forgotten, but those two stick out. The first one I missed by miles, but the second I might still hit if I don’t slack off.

After the revelation (which I think of as my superhero origin… not much of one, but I’m not much of a superhero :P), I wrote every day. There were days off, of course, lazy days, failure days, technical difficultly days, but even after I’d miss a few days, a few months, I always came back. Not because I loved it, and here’s a dark truth, I don’t always love writing. Some days I hate it more than I knew I could hate. Some days I’m just eh about it. But I do it, because of step 1 waaay at the top of the post. It was my childhood dream to be a writer, to tell these stories that I’m constantly in love with, so every day I write and, eventually, a novel comes out. That’s when I love being a writer.