I'm a Writer?

At university today we were all asked how we became Writers, Well until that point I wouldn't have classified myself as a Writer at all. I like to write and I one-day hope to be a Writer but what in fact would classify me as being a Writer? Getting published it seems is always a key factor, for as a society we see being a Writer as a profession.

Emily Dickinson had a mere twenty poems published during her lifetime out of her seventeen hundred written. So maybe that is the key to becoming a writer, we must all die! It seems today the best way to become published is to become a journalist where, unless you make a bloody big mistake, no one knows who you are, or you write a shockingly controversial novel about sex.

I started writing because I struggled a lot at school and a wise person once told me to keep a diary, it didn't matter what I wrote just as long as I practiced my English. I started to think about what else I could write, interesting bits of conversation, or something hilarious that I’d seen. Then I would imagine more exciting things than my mundane little town.

This I suppose is how I became a Writer. Although I still don’t think I will really call myself a Writer until there is a publication with my name on it but until then I will be a student of the pen, an aspiring writer. I do now believe that in fact anyone can be a writer whether a ten year old writing a story about her dog or a sixty year old telling his life story.

Rene Descartes said, “I think therefore I am” and so be it. Being a writer is a choice, a lifestyle choice as much as choosing a dress or a new house. To follow your dreams, or follow what you’re good at or just to follow a train of thought. Statistics say that most aspiring writers won’t make it. Well unless they develop amnesia and forget how to write it seems to me they have already made it.

I think I am a writer and so I am. I make the conscious decision to struggle through a penniless lonely existence living in a shoe box until that manuscript happens to fall at the right time onto the right desk, and crash! Bang! Wallop! My hopes and dreams are fulfilled.

But until that time, my shoe box will be filled with fairies and dragons and trees that grow upside down, cats that wear suits, never ending cupcakes and most importantly an endless supply of paper and ink.

Arrange and compose, You audience is waiting...