“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”
― Sylvia Plath
Writing is, in its truest form, a beautiful picture that you get to paint inside the heads of your readers. Before long, they will know the characters as if they’re real and believe that they too had a part in something much bigger. A real sense of belonging and purpose. But why would anyone want to spend most of their lives typing behind a computer to entertain others? Are people who have a passion for writing crazy? Is it truly worth all the hard work?
A passion for writing is powerful. Having the opportunity to voice your opinion, share your stories, and dream about what could be, is so fulfilling. I remember when I first discovered my interest in the subject. In college I read many fantasy books, old-fashioned literary stories, and lots of self-help books. I was hooked. The way words could be arranged on a piece of paper and have such a profoundly deep impact on the reader was like nothing I had ever experienced before. No matter where I was in life, happy or sad, scared or depressed, literature offered an escape.
Some of the toughest moments in my life were medicated with a good book. As funny as this may be to admit, books saved my life. I no longer felt alone because Harry Potter felt alone too. I no longer felt like a directionless compass because Gandalf taught us, “Not all those who wander are lost.” Words are fantastic things. You write them about people and they can hurt. Words can admit joy, laughter, and sometimes even tears. All of these feelings I felt compelled to share with others. If you as a writer can capture their emotions and take them along with you on a journey outside of their norm, then you’ve truly succeeded. Replacing the chaos in everyday life with an emotion that makes them feel better about themselves is something special.
Unfortunately, being able to do that as a writer is super difficult. It’s often even more so embarrassing because you have to be terrible at it, before you can be any good. There is no “he/she was just born with it,” you actually have to work your butt off to learn all the rules, all the genres, and most importantly, the practice of writing. You have to write when you want to sleep, write when you’d rather be on vacation, and write even when you don’t have the urge to do so. What separates a true writer from those who just love the idea is discipline. You need to set routines, schedules, goals and keep to them strictly. First rule you need to learn is to not put all your eggs into one basket. You’re most likely not going to write a hit novel your first time. (Boy did I have a tough time with this one. I believed I had a gold mine story, and then three years later I was still working on it. I excused my behavior with the normal statements, but the idea itself wasn’t very compelling to anyone other than me.)
So why choose to write you ask? Writing seems extremely difficult to be any good at it and it is not the most prestigious career to fall into, but the freedom is worth it. In the private or public sector of work you’re told what to do, how to do it, and when to do it. It’s incredibly difficult to infuse new ideas into a system that has worked for so many years, but the truth is not everyone is the same. Having a free thinking mind is powerful. You pick the direction you want to focus on, and you choose when the world will see that vision. If you want to stop midway through your project and work on something else, you’re certainly entitled to. What a beauty that is? Fantasy one month or a murder mystery the next. The possibilities are truly endless.
As a writer you will challenged yourself to always be the best you can be. You will fail a lot, something that I myself am waiting to figure out. You’ll be rejected by many. But if you are to make one person happy with your writing then the rest will melt away. Always have faith that you can achieve the impossible, because if you don’t, no one can.
I want to leave you with one more inspirational quote for you to think about, and remind you one more thing. The sword is just as mighty as the pen like Edward Bulwer- Lytton said, and I believe, even more so influential.
Cheers,
Alexander
Alexander Richter 