How I Became a Writer

Jesse Miller

When I began selling the things I wrote, I loved meeting new people who asked what I did for a living. I'd tell them "I'm a writer."

What did I mean by that? Did I mean that I earned my living by writing? That I was famous as a writer?

What I meant was that I had sold a few novellas and stories, and I wanted to be thought of as a writer.

Fame as a writer is often posthumous. Writers who are innovative usually meet rejection while they are alive. Becoming a writer is very much a kinetic process.

If a person is a really good and original scribe, chances are high his or her works will not be published while the author is still alive.

Famous Writers are known for their breakthrough techniques. They can be virtual pioneers in a particular style which may have kept them from being published or recognized in their own lifetime.

Like people who deliberately use incomplete sentences.

As long as there is growth, a writer is in the act of becoming him (or her) self. When learning and experience stop, the individual may be said to have become a writer at last, for then, he or she has arrived and is dead. DOA

If you have become a writer, your position is static. The operation will have become a success, and not just "but the patient died," it is more "because the patient died.".

As long as I'm polishing tricks and techniques to gain and hold my reader's attention, I'm in the act of becoming. Becoming a writer ...

So what makes a writer a writer if the criteria does not fall or rise on the question: "Have you been published?"

From the time I learned the alphabet, I've been conditioned to think of writing as therapeutic. If a bad thing happens, I write about it. If a good thing happens, the same. I write it down.

Even when nothing seems to be happening, I try to put that into words. In other words, write all the time.

Writing as therapy works.

Another thing ... one should really like the language. I've tried to learn the rules so I may use those rules as tools or as stepping stones.

My writing has to be deliberate and consciously formed. If I just spew stuff and hope it comes out OK, how will I be able to do more?

If you are baking a cake, and you simply wing it, sometimes your product will be good, but more often it will be bad. Then ... how can you learn if you haven't consciously made use of recognizable patterns?

For example, in your cake, you used sugar. The cake turns out fine. How much sugar did you use? You don't know? Then when the next cake isn't so good, you'll not know if the fault was in too much or too little sugar.

So becoming a writer means not only an awareness of writing rules for the purpose of flight, but also for the purpose of tracking ... and subsequently duplicating and even improving that flight.. ...

Take a course in Latin, so you gain a feel for the essence of construction in words and ideas in English.

A teacher of mine advised me recently, "Just write, and everything else will follow."

This admonition may seem trite, but that is too bad! Actually, "Just write, and everything else will follow," is critical! After all, no matter what happens, you do have to have that product. Also consider what it is you're expecting to gain by writing.

I'll tell you what I seek to gain by writing: I seek to invoke the campfire atmosphere. Writing for me means taking a turn at talking. I want to gain and hold your attention by talking in ways that may interest you. I'd present my ideas in a framework which is palatable to you. I try to keep the rhetoric salient.

Do it. Like truck driver, modeling or any other kind of school, the bottom line is: Just do it. Before, during and after training ... perform the writing.

Be true to yourself while you're at it. Even if you get commissioned to perform a job in a particular genre ... frame the task within your own perspective. You'll never be able to express anyone's view as well as your own. Because you live it. If your expression is second hand, you'll lose most of your readers.

This brings me to a flavor I can't really discuss: Luck.

Pioneer writers often get discovered by luck. Someone discovers a collection of manuscripts in an attic trunk, long after the author dropped dead.

Many pioneer writers get rejected by publishers because of the fact that their work is well ... different.

I can't talk about luck and publishing as part of the portfolio in a writer's career, because once the writing is done, you can not control either luck or publishers.

These threshold factors must not concern the aspirant as much as the drive to just tell the story ... whatever that story may be.

In other words, it gets rough when you try to manipulate fortune ... say, by sitting down and waiting for that fateful visit. No ... you have to write ... and that's what is meant by becoming a writer.

You believe you have no choice. How your efforts fly with others doesn't stop you. You just keep writing ... it has been said that the writing skill is something no one can take from you.

They may break your thumbs, steal your ink, pass laws that say you mustn't.

They may take your life breath away by force ... but until that moment, you keep becoming ... and after that final moment ... then you may be known as a writer ... a great writer.

Meanwhile, it is all varying degrees of education, experience and practice.