It's probably a question that a lot of people have asked you, but what advice would you give to young people who would like to become writers?
Seriously, I know that sounds simplistic. But it’s the only way.
Here’s the deal. If you want to become a writer (I’m assuming here that you mean “someone who writes as a career”: otherwise feel free to ignore what follows this), there are some things that simply starting to write will begin to reveal to you (and that nothing else can). These include:
What you’re interested in writing about
Whether you have anything interesting to say / worth saying about it
Whether you’re capable of writing well enough to hold your own interest
Whether you’re capable of writing well enough to hold anybody else’s
Whether you’re capable of doing the work of being a writer (which pretty much means either writing every day, or at the very least thinking about writing every day, for the rest of your life on this planet)
Whether (assuming that you discover you are capable) you really want to spend the rest of your life doing this. (Because though you may at some point decide to stop writing and do something else, it’s by no means certain that you’ll be able to stop. Even if you do stop writing, you may never be able to stop thinking about writing. And depending on your personality, this may be either an occasional mild annoyance, or your very own personal hell.)
It’s worth pausing here to say that wanting to be a career writer is not necessarily a wholly positive thing. It can be considered, as I’ve said elsewhere, as rather like a career in sewer maintenance. It’s difficult work, often unpleasant, usually lonely, often ineffective no matter how hard you work at it, frequently disruptive to family life, usually poorly paid for many years, hard to explain rationally to other human beings whether you’re enjoying it or not, almost always misunderstood by them, and even at the best of times, equivocal as to results. In these ways, writing as a career is missing almost all of the things most people seem to look for in their work.
But you won’t get to grips with any of this until you start writing and find out what it does to / for you. And additionally, until you find out:
Whether it’s enough fun to keep on doing it
Because at the (figurative) end of the day, it’s your enjoyment of and pleasure in what you create that will spur other people’s enjoyment of it. Suffering for your art is no particular virtue.* Yes, there’ll be hard work, lots of it, and some suffering — that’s kind of unavoidable in the long term — but at the (literal) end of the day, you should usually be able to walk away from the writing pad or the computer feeling good, feeling that you had fun, that it was worthwhile. The most misunderstood truth about writing, the one that career writers are always looking for the right way to phrase so that it doesn’t sound arrogant or exclusionary, is this: I didn’t do it for you. I did it for me.
I live in here: I have to live with this creation. You can always put the book down, walk away and forget about it. I don’t have that luxury. So I write to make me happy. If what I write makes you happy too, happy enough to keep buying my books, that’s gravy. But if I’m not enjoying what I do at least some of the time — enough to drown out the difficulties and annoyances at least in retrospect — there’s no point. If I didn’t enjoy the work, the odds are that you won’t either… and when it’s all over, neither of us will have anything worthwhile. Therefore I will tend to my own creative enjoyment first, and trust it to take care of yours.
…Anyway, if you just start writing, that’s half the battle. Sooner or later you’ll start working out where your heart lies, what kind of writing works best for you, what bits of your writing work best for other people (the latter two not always congruent, so beware…), and so forth. Sooner or later you’ll start developing a voice that’s identifiably yours and not a welded-together chorus of your favorites (and this takes a while: a lot of good writing, in the early stages anyway, is based on imitation of the writers you love).
That’s the point where you start thinking about how to propagate, foster and market what you’ve got: by submission to publishers, by self-publishing, by hunting down an agent, whatever. There’s a ton of advice on that out there in the online world: seek it out.
Meanwhile: why are you still reading this? Go write.
*Echoes here of the Monty Python line in all its lovely irony: “I suffered for my art. Now it’s your turn.”
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