The easy way to put it is: “If you want to be a writer, write.” But the easy way leaves out all sorts of little moments. It’s still true, and at the core that’s the secret above all others, but it doesn’t say nearly everything. How could it?

I won’t get into a discussion about professional vs. hobbyist writers and how much money makes you a pro and “I’m a writer because I say I am and I like to write” vs “I’m a writer because I do it for a living” or any of that. I don’t care about those lines just this second. They have nothing to do with this.

No, instead, if you want to be a writer, for whatever value you are going to assign to it, you need to write. Constantly. As much as possible. My “as much as possible” will be different from yours, sure, but that doesn’t matter as much as just doing the work does. If you want to be a writer and you talk about it and go through the motions and know everything but don’t actually do any writing? You ain’t one.

But I mentioned it missed the little moments, right? What are those, then. Well they’re probably exactly what you think they are. So you write, and that’s that. Sure. But keep in mind that if you write a lot… well…

* You’ll never be satisfied with anything you do. Oh, you’ll learn to let things go but nothing will ever be perfect, and even if it gets close, when you look back at it in a year or so it will seem worse and worse. This will never end or ease up.

* You’ll learn the horrible, nightmarish answer to “Where do your ideas come from.” No, really. People ask that all the time and everyone who creates anything kind of rolls their eyes and passes it off but we all know. Ideas come from everything, everywhere. It’s a muscle, your idea generator, and once you build it up enough you learn that ideas are cheap, because they’re endless and they will never stop. Everything is fodder. They won’t shut up. Ever. Might sound like a pot of gold to you now but it is a constant screaming insistence in your brain after a while. Hooray.

* Everyone will assume you’re not doing anything. Doesn’t matter. If you write people will think you’re sitting idle. Or not doing anything important. Thinking is a large part of the job. Kinda crucial. But if you’re sitting and staring at a wall most people don’t get that, for fuck’s sake, you’re working!

* You’ll get to spend endless amounts of time producing things that take a few minutes or hours to read. Yeah. I spent about a year on a novel, from writing to proofing and so on. Took people a day to read. You’ll want it to take as long to read as it did to write and that doesn’t work. Hey, how long does it take to write, record and produce a song? More than the 3 minutes it took me to listen to it. Argh.

Yeah it’s a ball of laughs, I tell you. Of course you also get to play with something so base-level human it predates fire. Telling stories is how we learn, it’s how we remember and share information. It is the root of all tool use and learning. There is nothing more primal than the ability to tell stories.

So for all the crap, still pretty nifty, no?