How Do I Become a Writer?
Become the Writer You Always Wanted to Be in These Easy Steps…Just Kidding. But here are a bunch of suggestions.
What’s the best way to become a writer? It’s a question haunting message boards across the internet. Some people offer answers, and there are some basic actions you can’t get around: write a lot, read a lot, find time in your life for both of these things. But how each writer takes on these basic actions is entirely individual, from what you read to the work you need to do to financially support your writing life. Instead of going into a litany of case studies, I’ll start with a bad metaphor. You’re welcome.
Let’s say developing a writing life is like climbing a long, slow cliff. Picture the Cliffs of Insanity from The Princess Bride, after the rope gets cut.
The writing life waiting at the top of the cliff can be whatever you want: bestseller, a children’s book, a lyrical story collection, a heartrending memoir, a collection of poems. Or you may be surprised by where you find yourself. And this cliff metaphor doesn’t totally work, because like most things in life, when you reach what you consider a major milestone, you’re already looking up, looking for more.
In rockclimbing, you search for a path up the cliff. It depends on your body type and years of practice and conditioning and probably external factors I don’t understand because I don’t climb: wind, heat, light, terrain. Or, every surfer catches a different wave and each wave is different. Snowflakes. You get the gist. The thing to recognize here is that rock climbing is hard work. Surfing is difficult. Writing ain’t no cakewalk, either (and, because writing, I have to go look up the origins of cakewalk, and now I know that cakewalks were actually challenging, and the conditions under which one originally would have found oneself at a cakewalk were beyond what any human should have to endure). A writer should expect to work hard.
Another example, this one more concrete: two friends of mine went back to the university where we studied creative writing to do a reading and Q&A. The students wanted to know about one thing: MFA programs. How much to spend, where to apply, which are good, etc. As college students, it makes sense that they were fixated on grad school. But I think this illustrates a key problem with our current creative writing culture. An MFA program provides two-to-four years of writing education. Writers will continue learning to be writers and writing (unless they throw in the towel) for the rest of their lives.
These students had in front of them a high-powered marketing exec who writes poems, short stories, and YA as well as raises her son. She loves writing, and fits it into her already full calendar. The other writer in front of them is a prize-winning story writer who pays nominal rent in a punk house in Minneapolis. She pays the bills by waitressing and teaching three days a week. She rarely dates, and she isn’t planning on having a family. She is rich in writing time. Both women are writers, dear friends, attended the same MFA program, and nearly the same age. But how they have learned to fit writing into their lives is wildly different. And they are both successful at it.
A writer, like a seeker, should expect to find good and bad advice along the way, but never to follow the exact same path as another writer. The endless debates about whether creative writing can be taught and whether MFAs work and if you should pay for school or if you should work as a teacher or any other aspect of the writing life make what I believe to be a false assumption: that any of us can define one path to becoming a writer. If a tall climber tried to get me to scale a wall her way, I’d be screwed (4’10” and proud). But these tiny fingers can find purchase where a larger person could not. Maybe I can’t show up to a pivotal competition where all the right people will be (sponsors, team coaches, etc.). A friend nails it and gets a great new gig. Bully for her (again, pause for etymology break).
In one of her lectures, Mary Ruefle says, “I never write with another body in the room, changing the flux of my mind.” Though I’ve been writing for over 15 years, this is the first time I’ve heard this aspect of my own writing behavior accurately explained. I can edit with another person in the room, maybe, but mostly my brainwaves function best in isolation. Some writers I know prefer busy cafes, and I’ve often wished I was one of them, thinking my need for isolation was a failing on my part.
I’m ashamed to admit this, but I needed to hear Ruefle’s words in order to justify my own way of writing. This is yet another of the ways to become a writer. Setting aside the misleading, if well-intentioned, maxims tossed in the faces of those who have the impulse to write — which is only satisfied by writing — a writer-in-training will find bits of wisdom in which she recognizes herself-as-writer, or the kind of writer she wants to become.
A word of warning: you won’t find what you need by looking in the same place over and over again. Starting with the basics, the canon, and the big publications is fine. But go international, go outside of your genre, look outside of your city. Use the internet to watch lectures. Chase down all the work of lesser-known writers you admire. A writer’s education can get stuck on a loop of the same old conversation. Engage as many conversations about writing, with both the living and the dead, as you can.
What’s the best way to become a writer? Your way. How do you become a writer? Look for examples of the kind of writer you want to be — on pages, on the streets, in anecdotes — and follow those crannies to climb your own path. This means reading, attending readings, reading the essays and letters of dead writers (I’ve found Chekhov’s endlessly helpful). This means finding out how other writers make it work with or without family, money, universities, and the millions of other variables in a writing life. Most of all, to become a writer, you must write.
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Laura Scott’s writing has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Okey-Panky, No Tokens, Tin House’s Flash Friday, Monkeybicycle, and other publications. She serves as managing editor for Lavil: Life, Love, and Death in Port-au-Prince (McSweeney’s/Verso 2017), and is one of OneRoom’s novel writing coaches. Find out more about working with a coach here↓
