Somewhere in my family album is a picture of me, eight years old, sitting at my aunts’ typewriter. I think what it says is that writers are born to tell stories.
Our friend Amalia would like to know what kind of training you need to have, to become a writer. I’m here to tell you this: Mostly you have to train yourself.
I know, I know, there are all sorts of writing courses out there. I’ve never taken one. But if I were to teach one (I have some experience, teaching “writing” in an adult night school), I would say there are only two things the aspiring writer really needs to do and will get nowhere, fast, if he or she doesn’t do them:
Read, read, and read some more!
Write, write, and keep on writing.
Again, we now have self-publishing, which we didn’t have when I finally sold my first novel in 1986, and that takes away a lot of the frustration and the heartache. Even so, I can’t help feeling my work is nothing, really, unless someone out there is willing to pay to publish it. Not so many years ago, you would hardly believe how difficult that was to achieve!
I have known wannabe novelists who hardly ever read novels. They have no idea what a story looks like, let alone how to create one and tell it. They create characters who are thinly-veiled wishful-thinking avatars of themselves, and it’s a rare reader who won’t see through it.
Anyhow, it’s really pretty simple. If you want to be a writer, you have to read and write a lot. An awful lot.
You won’t be able to help getting better at it.
I was always a reader, even before I was old enough to read– I tried it anyway. Then, later, I began to write but never tried to be published except for a spot on a website, along with several other writers. My thing is still reading. I have to donate boxes of books to church, friends, and the local library; otherwise, books would take over the house.
Ditto my apartment.
My house is full of books, as was my parents’ house. Each of my 4 children now have houses/apartments with the same problem. They all have kept extensive journals since about age 8. My youngest daughter writes enthralling tales of her many travels. Some of these she puts on social media.
I just wrote when I can get to it. I have a lot of poetry that I wrote over the years. At present, I’m into memoir-writing mostly for the benefit of my kids and grandkids. What I really need currently is to stick with one journal and stop writing in this one and then later grab another one because I misplaced the other I was using. I do date each entry in whichever notebook I’m using but I’ve got a seriously bad habit going on and it needs to stop.
Practice makes perfect, repetition is the key to learning, and don’t use a bunch of overused aphorisms.
Do you have any favorite overused aphorisms? I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours.