Check out this sample from my online course, This is What a Writer Looks Like!: A Creative Mindset Online Course, where I share my writer origin story.
I have been a writer since 1996. I studied journalism and worked at a few newspapers. Even though I left that career, I knew I was still a writer. I had ideas for books, short stories, essays, poems, but I struggled to get started on any of my ideas. I read all the time. I journaled all the time. But ultimately, I was running in circles because I had a self-defeating mindset that held me back.
After I took a few years off from even thinking about being a writer, an idea came to me and I started working on it as an essay. Then I started to develop a character. Then the character started appearing in scenes. I developed other characters who were her friends, enemies, love-interests. I gave her goals and ambitions, challenges to overcome. And then I realized I had a novel in my head that needed to be written. That's the beginning of my origin story to become a novelist. I couldn't shake this story.
When I made the decision to write that novel, some interesting things started happening. I started to imagine myself as a novelist. Then as chance would have it, I ran into an old friend who confessed to me that she had just finished writing a novel. We started to meet for lunch regularly and swapped pages. Suddenly I was spending my lunch break either talking, writing with my friend, or sneaking away to write more pages. I wrote on all my breaks. I wrote at night after I got home.
And the whole time this was happening, I was keeping it a secret from my husband.
It was weird, I know, but I lived in this head space that if I told him what I was doing, this magic spell of self-confidence that I had developed would crumble around me and I would be that person I had been before – someone who wanted to be a writer but never actually wrote anything down.
Eventually, I had to tell him because we had one computer in the house – one of those old desktop jobs where anyone can look over your shoulder and see what you are doing. He was going to find out.
It’s not just my husband. Even now as someone who has been educated, published, finished multiple novels, essays, short stories and other pieces, I am not always comfortable telling people that I’m a writer.
But what is a real writer? What do we imagine when we think of what a writer looks like?
Because we have ideas and concepts of what writers look like and what writers do, it will cause people to tell themselves that they can’t be one because they don’t fit the mold. And these ideas have developed because of how writers have been presented to us.
My image of what a writer looks like came from popular media when I was a girl, which was the late 80s and 90s. I saw photos on the back of Danielle Steel’s books – because access to female authors was limited for me: usually Danielle Steele, Mary Higgins Clark, Jackie Collins. On television, writers were often men. Women were poets. With the glorious exception of Jessica Fletcher from Murder She Wrote.
As someone who grew up on a farm, and as a first generation college student, I did not see myself as any of those popular-at-the-time writers. Girls who grew up like me did not grow up to be writers. I was supposed to grow up to be a teacher, nurse, or take over the family flower shop.
And because I couldn’t not be a writer like on TV – I stalled the decision to become a writer and chased other career paths instead.
When I was 13 years old and contemplating what I wanted to be when I grew up, and my little heart sang that I should write books, instead I developed a list of what a writer looked like.
Here is what what I had told myself a writer was:
A writer was … Old. The writer ingenue was not a thing in my world. Writers were the most adult of adults. Jessica Fletcher was a mature widowed woman who solved crimes while visiting glamorous friends on vacation, when she wasn’t helping the dad from Happy Days solve crimes in her hometown.
A writer was … Male, or if female, incredibly glamorous.
A writer was … Educated. Writers, even with the most “humble” beginnings, worked their way to a notable school, often an Ivy League school or a school in New York.
A writer was … Privileged. It seemed like writers had money which allowed them to write.
A writer was … popular with other writers. It seems like writers knew other writers, agents, publishers, publicists, and directors. I knew no one. I had never met anyone who wrote books for a living.
A writer was … full of unlimited creative ideas. I was terrified of running out of ideas before I ever wrote a word.
But what is the truth?
There are all kinds of writers, from different backgrounds. Because my worldview was limited, I had a limited worldview of what being a writer looked like and how I could make that career my own.
I had no concept when I developed these preconceived notions that the world would change, that I would change, and that I didn’t have to have everything figured out before I started. I wish I had had someone to tell me of that so long ago.
If you are wishing to see yourself as a “real” writer, to clear out some of those creative blocks, and create a schedule for yourself so you will trust that the pages will be written, check out my online course, This is What A Writer Looks Like!
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