I Want to Be a Writer but I Dont Know What to Write
Then You Want To Exist A Writer? That's Mistake #1
There are two types of writers, Schopenhauer once observed, those who write considering they accept something they have to say and those who write for the sake of writing.
If you're immature and yous retrieve y'all want to exist a writer, chances are you are already in the second camp. And all the advice you'll get from other people nearly writing just compounds this terrible impulse.
Write all the time, they'll tell you. Write for your college paper. Get an MFA. Go to writer's groups. Ship query letters to agents.
What do they never say? Get do interesting things.
I was lucky enough to really become this advice. Combine this with the fact that I was too self-witting to tell people that I wanted to be a writer, I became one in undercover.
I'm non saying I'one thousand great at information technology or anything, but I am a bestselling author at 26. I have a column with a major newspaper. I get paid to write professionally. A fair amount of aspiring writers are prissy enough to email me questions well-nigh becoming a author. I commonly have the same answer: Well, wanting to be a "writer" is your first error.
The problem is identifying as a writer. As though assembling words together is somehow its own activity. Information technology isn't. Information technology's a ways to an finish. And that stop is e'er to say something, to speak some truth or reach someone outside yourself.
Deep down, y'all already know this. Take whatever good slice of writing, something that matters to you lot. Why is it good? Because of what information technology says. Because what the writer manages to communicate to you, their reader. It's considering of what's inside information technology, non how they wrote it.
No one ever reads something and says, "Well, I got absolutely nothing out of this and accept no idea what any of this means only it certain is technically beautiful!" But they say the contrary all the time, they say "Goddamn, that's good" to things with typos, poor grammar and uncomplicated wording.
Practiced writing saves nothing. On the other hand, a deep, compelling or stunning bulletin tin float writers who struggle to even complete a sentence.
So if you lot want to exist a writer, put "writing" on hold for a while. When y'all find something that is new and different and you can't look to share with the world, y'all'll beat your fat hands confronting the keyboard until you lot get it out in one course or another.
Everything that is good in my writing came from risks I took outside of schoolhouse, outside of the "craft." It was sleeping on Tucker Max's flooring for a year. It was working as Robert Greene's assistant. Information technology was working at American Wearing apparel, watching the function politics and learning how to become stuff washed. It was dropping out of college at 19. Information technology was proverb aye to every coming together and introduction I got, and hustling to get as many as I could on my own. It was reading dozens of books a calendar month.
It was going to therapy. It was getting into pointless arguments. It was having friends who are smarter than me. It was traveling. It was living (briefly) in the ghetto. I was able to write virtually the dark side of the media considering I put myself in a position to see information technology firsthand.
All these things gave me something to say. They gave me a perspective. They gave me a fucked upwards writing style that makes my voice unique. They gave me opinions that tend to piss people off.
It also gave me money and the marketing experience to brand my projects a success.
I don't know the first thing well-nigh how to write (as you lot probably noticed in this mail). I nod along and pretend that I know what things like "subject" and "predicate" and "passive tense" actually mean. I mean, I think I take an idea, but it hasn't held me dorsum and so far. To quote Schopenhauer over again, "to have something to say" is "by itself virtually a sufficient status for good style." I'll accept form school dropout writing passionately in his prison cell over some empty, superior Yale MFA whatever day.
Part of what I've said hither is my opinion. There are many means to go a writer and though my style worked for me, y'all may prefer a different route. So you tin have that part or leave it. Merely another part of information technology is an undeniable change in the economic science of the business of writing.
Run into, it used to be that getting "published" was the hard part. You had to print some gatekeeper and that gatekeeper was an amanuensis or an editor at magazine, at a newspaper or at a book publisher (all of whom were typically trained writers). Well, today there are essentially an infinite amount of outlets to characteristic your writing. And no matter where you ultimately practise get your writing out, you lot'll have to bring your own audience with you anyway.
Getting published is easy. Getting anyone to care? Well, that'due south the hard part.
What matters more now than any other single thing is that what y'all're maxim is different–that it'due south interesting, that information technology provokes some response from people. You'll just accomplish this if you've got something you have to say. Ameliorate still, y'all demand to have something that you tin't NOT say. If what you're writing is a coercion rather than a vehicle for your brandish how smart and well practiced you are.
So remember about it one more fourth dimension. Is it that you desire to be a writer? Or it'southward that yous have these things within you that yous want very badly to communicate to people and writing is the best style to do it?
Getting the answer to that question correct is the day y'all actually become a writer.
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Want to larn more about writing? Check out WritingRoutines.com and the free PDF " 12 Essential Writing Routines To Help You To Craft Your Own."
This post originally ran on ThoughtCatalog.com. Comments can be seen there.
Ryan Holiday is the bestselling author of Trust Me, I'chiliad Lying, The Obstacle Is The Way, Ego Is The Enemy, and other books about marketing, culture, and the homo condition. His work has been translated into thirty languages and has appeared everywhere from the Columbia Journalism Review to Fast Visitor. His company, Contumely Bank check, has brash companies such as Google, TASER, and Circuitous, as well as Grammy Award winning musicians and some of the biggest authors in the world. He lives in Austin, Texas.
Source: https://ryanholiday.net/so-you-want-to-be-a-writer-thats-mistake-1/
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