So You Want to Be a Writer

I will admit right now that I am not the world’s leading expert on writing, far from it, however, there are some things I have come to learn. The following are three things I have picked up along the way, shared views with authors, and remind myself of daily.

Write What You Know

The best writing advice I’ve ever gotten, well that any of us have ever gotten, is “Write what you know” by our dear Ernest Hemingway. It is generally thought that maybe this isn’t the best idea when it comes to authoring, but I think the ‘what we know’ is more about using what all humans know and writing something that we can relate to. All humans know pain, loneliness, joy, boredom, exhaustion, love, etc. We can use all these known feelings and thoughts to write stories and poetry that excites and connects us.

One of my favorite authors, and the world-renowned JK Rowling, probably didn’t know about spells, magical worlds, unicorns, and dementors when she started her great series. What she did know from her own life experiences, was loyalty, bravery, intelligence, and strength and wrote those into her characters making them personal and incredibly known in our current world.

With how unique we all are we all have different perspectives, opinions, ideas, and feelings even on the same shared experiences. We’ve all had moments and lives that are only true to who we are and we owe it to ourselves and to the world to share it.

Write Every Day

Writing every day may help you write that book you’ve been putting off, or maybe it won’t! What it will do is force you to get in the habit and improve your skill. Like anything else, practice is what will make the difference. Anne Lamott the American Novelist says about writing every day, “It’s not about writing when you feel like writing. I can honestly tell you that I never feel like writing.”

I can absolutely concur that I do not feel like writing every day. Sometimes I get into the habit of it and its flowing and easy and I write every day and other days I refuse. Some days I struggle to even put a sentence down, some days all I do is write about my day. Writing isn’t easy, if it were, everyone would be doing it.

What it does, however, is create a habit. Habits are made when we repeatedly do the same things over and over until it’s just part of who we are or our routine. Humans are creatures of habit, we love it, even if we feel like we don’t. What do you do every morning? I bet you whatever it is, you do it morning after morning with only slight variation. Bathroom first or start the coffee?

Start the habit of writing. Pick a time of day, (6:00 PM as dinner is cooking?), pick a place (a favorite chair, a cozy coffee shop), if you love routine go ahead and pick a favorite music or drink or whatever it is and then sit down and write something! Good, bad, ugly, or brilliant. If it’s just a paragraph, a sentence or a whole page of BS at least it’s something. Then do it again the next day.

Write even when it's hard.

Know Your Characters

Whether you are writing fiction, poetry, non-fiction or a biography you have to know your characters. I’m not just talking about knowing a few random facts about them that you show throughout the story. I mean things that no one will ever know about them, characteristics that may not even make it into your writing but you’ll know. You have to know your characters like you do your best friends or your mom. You need to know their backgrounds, desires, thoughts, ambitions, dreams, and things they hate. You need to know their mannerisms, annoying or endearing. A lot of times our characters are written after ourselves or people we’ve known. Incorporate those parts of a person that makes them, them.

The reason for this is so that when someone reads your work they will connect, relate and understand not only your character but the entire plot. They will understand better why something happens or doesn’t. Knowing your character makes that character a rounded-out person and not just a two-dimensional figure moving through the world without any purpose.

Many, but probably not all authors will know entire worlds and generations beyond their characters and you can read it in their writing and it captures your attention. Why do you need to know that great-great-aunt Libby collected hundreds of books if we never meet her? Because it can show that your main character has a great love of reading that has been passed down to her. Or why do you need to know the entire country you’re writing in? Because your characters live there.

These characters can be anyone you’d like, use your imagination! You’re a writer after all!