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So you want to be a writer

It’s easy to be a writer. You sit down and add one word to another until you have a sentence. Then you add another sentence and another until you have a paragraph. Then lots and lots and lots of paragraphs and you have a chapter. A given number of chapters will result in a book.

You do need a modicum of talent. A flash of inspiration helps as does a working knowledge of the foibles of mankind.

But, writing a book is essentially about applying yourself to the task. Writing is after all what you are about, not reading about or talking about writing. A writer writes.

To help you along the way you need a little discipline. You need to set a time when you will write and if possible a place where you will write at the set time. When you sit down at the allotted hour you will write for the duration of your time at the keyboard. Dreaming and plotting and planning are done away from your writing time; which should be a minimum of one hour, per day.

You will reflect on your current writing task through the day. Your subconscious will work on it as you attend to your daily chores. Once you have a dream, you can write about it. Dreams will disappear unless you write them down, so have a notebook or an open file ready wherein you can place the sudden bursts of inspiration that all working writers experience when they are away form the writing area.

You keep this notebook even though you may never refer to it in the heat of your writing hour. Somehow, the idea is added to your store as a writer and your creative self chooses and selects what it will use to tell the story as you proceed, for writing well is all. It matters not what ideas are used or discarded, just that the story is told as well as it could ever be told.

Some writers set a working target of so many words per session, so many words a day or a week or a month and so on until the book is done. It’s a way of keeping count of where you are; but be wary that if you set a target per hour and you exceed it in a quarter of the hour you don’t wane and waste your time at the writing hour. Or, if you fall short in a word count that you despair. Unattainable goals are vexing. Write for an hour. Count the words; be happy, write again tomorrow.

A writer writes words, one upon another until all is done. We write so readers understand. The reader trusts you to play fair as the storyteller of their choice. Write only what you believe in.

Write only what the reader can believe in; that way your story will have a resonance all of its own for the reader to savour.

You will be a writer of repute.

© Brendan Nolan 2009

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