Am I A Writer?

For as long as I remember, I loved making up stories. The earliest attempt at writing that I remember was fan fiction long before anyone knew what fan fiction was. In elementary school my friends and I would write stories using the characters and settings from our favorite Saturday morning cartoons.

It was as early as high school when I decided I wanted to "be a writer". The problem was that I had some delusional ideas of what being a writer meant. I split my time between trying to set up my perfect writing area and daydreaming about what life would be like when I was finishing my fifth bestseller, doing national book tours, and attending the Hollywood premiere of my last bestseller. In between all that I did nothing but collect numerous unfinished works in progress.

It wasn't until my early twenties that I actually completed enough material to submit. It was short stuff that I submitted to magazines and comic publishers. Rejections came as expected, but I slowly waned. Soon I was married and starting a family and becoming a writer seemed like a dream.

To examine all that, and why or why not I was failing, would take hundreds of thousands of words, but one of the problems was this. I thought I had to become a writer, when in fact I was already a writer.

Just because you are not published does not mean that you are not a writer. A painter paints, a musician makes music, and a writer writes.

And that is the important part. I write. If I want to become published, and I do, I have to increase my productivity and write more, and re-write more and more, but I don't have to worry about becoming a writer.

Because I already am.