Question and Answer

Q:        When can I call myself a writer?

A:        When you pick up a pen and write?

It's a simple answer, but true - if you write, you are a writer - if you paint or draw or sculpt, you are an artist - if you fish, you are an angler.......

Perhaps the question was wrong?  What many of us are actually asking is "When will I feel like I am a writer?"

For me, it is the moment when, after having performed my allotted labour with pen or keyboard - be it a set amount of time at my desk, or a set number of words on the page -  I have moved on to some other task (cooking, gardening, cleaning, or even trying to go to sleep) only to find myself wanting to return to my desk and write down all the extra bits of plot and conversation that are now caroming round my skull, begging to be put on paper. Creating has ceased to be a struggle and has instead begun to flow.

Though most of us (especially we procrastinators) can find it painful to make that first pen stroke each day, there comes a moment when, after consecutive applications of self discipline have led to a growing body of work, we begin to develop a sense of achievement in our writing.  It is not far from there to genuinely enjoying not only the results, but the process - then, though you have been a writer ever since you first put pen to paper, you begin to feel that you truly are one.

Savour the feeling, but don't rest on your laurels (they will only prickle your bum) - get back to that desk, notebook, keyboard, scrap of paper, or beer coaster, and write.

There will be other days when the distance from your lounge to your desk is so daunting that it might be measured in miles instead of meters, but call up that memory of creative joy and march once more into the fray.