How I Became A Writer
When I speak or make grammatical errors, which quite often. People look at me and say, “how could you do that, you’re a writer” and I’d just look at them and carry on.
Now I’ll admit, I’m probably not the Hemingway of writing or even a F Scott Fitzgerald, but one thing I am, is that I am a writer and one who is constantly improving.
I started out last year, with this writing thing, it provided me with a sense of catharsis. I was in a very dark period of my life and I needed a way to work through things, a way to make sense of the overwhelming emotions I felt or a way to shield me from the dark cloud of impending doom that I felt was hanging over me.
I had to two options at the time either start a podcast (which I hoped no one was going to hear, but I was going to put it out anyway) or writing (same rules applied). At the time my friends all encouraged me to do radio and I was pretty good at talking, heck! I talk for a living (I’m a teacher, the ones with a fulfilling job, low pay and that might give you a F if you’re assignment isn’t adequate).
I am really good at speaking, I can switch it on in an instant, but when I was confronted with this problem, I wanted to try something different… Something that was hard. So I decided to write. I was never a good writer, I wrote poems in school, wrote music but I never was good at applying the rules of grammar and to this day if you ask me what an auxiliary verb is, I’ll give you a confused look because I think verbs all serve the same purpose.
I started researching platforms to write on and stumbled across Medium which made my life so much easier and as they say the rest is history. Now when people criticize me for making errors I don’t feel offended at all, nor do I defend my position. I let it slide because I realized there’s two ways to develop.
1. Fail in public
I know the quote that say “people are rewarded in public for what they practice in private”. And I simply couldn’t comply with that, because how was I going to get better if there wasn’t any feedback? So, I couldn’t risk that, I wanted to get better and improve. So I started the medium account, and posted consistently and maybe it isn’t there now (telling you to drop critiques or comments in the comments section), but I always welcome criticism and if you look back you’ll see that some of my older posts has a lot of errors in them and some still do. But if you look at the progress I’ve made, you’ll see that I’m a bit more knowledgeable on grammar (I still make mistakes) and my formatting is different and I still haven’t dropped my crazy use of brackets.
So if I can give one piece of advice it’ll be, fail in public, because you’ll have more critics that will help you fast track your progress and you can connect to the people you want to touch in your writing.
2. Practice in private
“build in private so the haters don’t know what to tear down” — Definitely not a Chinese Proverb
Most people choose this option and it applies to a lot of scenarios. The reason we practice in private, is so that when you bring it to the light, it will look like magic and people will be in awe of your results. But imagine if J. K Rowling had written in private until she became “good” to have the acceptance of the world, we would probably never have gotten great books like Harry Potter. By the same token who would’ve decided what the standard was? As far as I know things change and even the criteria changes for the gatekeepers e.g. Look at rappers first we had rappers who rapped about selling drugs to make a living and that was the standard, then we had rappers who advocated against the use of it, then it moved to rappers who used drugs and that was cool. Now, we’ll… Rap music is inaudible so… I guess that’s the new standard.
Imagine how crazy it would be that when you finally perfected what was perceived as good writing, they change the criteria.
Conclusion
If you look at all the successful writers like Ryan Holiday, Tim Ferriss, you’ll see that they never studied “how to write” or did a course in writing. They did what I’ve done, get a laptop/writing pad and started writing,failing and then fixing their mistakes. They never subscribed to whoever’s notion of how a writer should write but rather forged their own path and writing style and simply followed their curiosity .
“If there is a gatekeeper standing in your way, rather than paying the fee. Smash through the damn gates with your boldness and uniqueness” — D.R
So to all the people that pointed out my mistakes, Thank you, but I am a writer, not a perfect one because I am learning, but I am a writer nonetheless.
Hi, I am Danley, a 20 year old with big dreams and the crazy belief of “hey! I could do that”, If you liked this post consider reading the others. Want to drop a comment or critique? you are welcome. Like the way I write, consider following, other than that, I hope you continue being an awesome person 😄
