The Ultimate Guide to Being a Writer
Here are the 50 actual steps that make you a writer.
Published in
3 min readNov 17, 2019
- Experience The Spark: the moment you discover that your soul belongs to writing. Also called the whim, by skeptics.
- Buy a fancy pen and a fancy notebook.
- Buy another notebook. Two is better than one, for the aesthetic.
- Make it three. Magic number. What goes around comes around. Make the universe think you’ll be productive.
- Wear a plaid orange and cerulean shirt and salmon Top Siders. Remember: eccentricity makes the writer.
- Sit at a café with your notebooks, laptop, and a spicy avocado and sweet potato latte. E c c e n t r i c i t y.
- Fan a number of books (On Writing, The Elements of Style, Writing a Book — for Dummies) on the table. Optional: actually read them.
- Tap the pen on your chin till you find THE perfect rhythm.
- Don’t use the pen for anything else.
- Set the latte aside, it’s disgusting.
- Gaze into the void while thinking deeply and meaningfully. “Do centipede really have a hundred legs?”
- Find a brilliant idea. This is it!
- Tap a few words on your keyboard.
- Grimace at the terrible idea you just had.
- Delete the few words you’d tapped on your keyboard.
- Glare at the other people in the café. Their mingling and scone-binging is the reason you’re not being productive.
- Scroll down your Instagram feed. You’re researching for character depth.
- Open a 34th tab on your browser.
- Write ten words.
- Open a 35th tab.
- Edit what you’ve written.
- Reward yourself for the work you’ve done so far.
- Read somebody else’s writing.
- Get desperate because you’ll never write this good.
- Call your long-estranged third removed cousin who just posted about a luxury trip in Greece on his Instagram and whom you never call.
- Make sure to let them know how hard you’re working.
- End the call abruptly, emphasizing that you’ve got loads to do.
- Eureka! Tap.
- Yikes! Delete.
- Bang your head on the table.
- Watch a YouTube video of Justin Bieber explaining why knitting should become an Olympic sport (that’s research for character depth).
- Shake hands with the man who just sat in front of you, he may be a literary agent.
- Glare at him when you understand that he’s just one more mingler-binger.
- Glance at the time.
- Get outraged by how fast time flies when one has so much to do.
- Say as much out loud.
- Glare at the mingler-binger when he responds. That was a rhetorical remark for dramatic effect, sir.
- Open a 36th tab.
- Swear when your the browser crashes.
- Gather your stuff to leave: throw the books and notebooks and pen in your backpack, stuff a couple of napkins in your pockets.
- Be hit by a fantastic idea.
- Punch the space bar of your keyboard until it’s clear your laptop won’t wake up anytime in this century.
- Frantically look for the pen in the underworld of your backpack.
- Find it after having retrieved a handful of doubtfully sticky Mars wraps, a half-eaten (green?) tuna sandwich, two doves, and a magic lamp from it.
- Ignore the mingler-binger’s staring.
- Bang your head on the table because the idea has flown away.
- Throw the handful of doubtfully sticky Mars wraps, the half-eaten (green?) tuna sandwich, the two doves, and the magic lamp back inside your bag.
- Make a dramatic exit, possibly involving being caught in a holdup but heroically getting out of it by punching the thief in the nose without breaking your thumb.
- Get patched up because you did get your thumb broken when you punched the thief in the nose.
- Repeat tomorrow.
