One of the things people often ask about writers is “how did you know you were meant to be a writer?” And more often than not that question, and those which mirror it, come from others battling with varying levels of imposter syndrome in their beginning steps into the written world. Imposter syndrome is the creepy stalker that knows your home address and won’t adhere to your restraining order. I.e. it shows up everywhere.
To bring it to the most simple point, writing is very hard. Even worse is the battle to break into any official publication form. With so many battles and not always the best support structures in place, it can be very easy to question if you are even “cut out” for this sort of life. Because I’ve had this conversation with my other writer friends and those just starting out so often I wanted to take some time today to try and answer that question here.
The first and most obvious indicator that you are a writer is that you want to write. I know this sounds dumb because isn’t that a given? Well, yes and no. There is a difference between getting an idea for a story and going “Ooo, that would make a cool book!” and then being that person with the idea who starts to feel a sense of frustration because not only do they have this idea but they got it in a place where they can’t actively set aside time to write in that exact moment. There’s a slight (sometimes more so) annoyance that normal life activities are blocking you digging deeper into said idea right then and there.
And in that same vein you’ll likely find yourself thinking about writing a lot. Wishing you had remembered your notebook in a meeting because at least you could jot down some ideas on your character’s back story. Playing back possible scenes and dialogs in your head as you drive between chores, work, and general social interactions. Instead of listening to a song just because you like the beat you find yourself turning it into the background music for a particularly intense scene in your story.
You might also find that the act of sitting down and writing your stories or working on them in general often effects your mood. You might find a new level of joy and energy appears after you’ve spent some time doing it. It could be the worst day of my life, but give me an hour on a story and suddenly I’m super bouncy and bubbly. There is just something so healing and life giving about being able to really pour yourself into this special personal world you’ve created.
There’s also this part of it that I’ve found within myself where my stories just refuse to let me go. Where the act of writing just won’t be shut down in me.
I’ve not spent much time discussing it on my various online platforms, but truth be told, I have struggled a lot with depression for the majority of my life. Add to that an overly generous dosage of insecurity and you have the girl who put aside her story for almost eight years. But within that span of time the story became like my own little ghost, haunting me wherever I went. Believe me, I tried my absolute best to squash it down in that time period, because I felt like such a failure with it all. But the draw was always there. So much so that I had to find other avenues to write through. Even though my story was locked away I continued to fill journal after journal, switching more to a “poetic” essayist format, along with a bunch of short stories and a litany of comic book ideas.
For eight years I tried to get rid of that part of me. In the end the hunger for writing was far more intense than the pain of unfulfilled dreams. I remember discussing this idea with another friend before and they spoke on how I had “an amazing amount of tenacity” in not giving up. I replied, “Tenacity, stubbornness – whatever you want to call it! It runs deep in me where even though it hurts like crazy I just can’t give up on the dreams. At least not for forever, they always come back.”
They always come back.
It may not be the story you started with or in the form you were hoping for, but time and time again for the ones who have it deep within them to write, there continues this yearning for it.
Now that’s not to say that you’ll have this ability to always stir yourself up to write. Wanting to do something and being able to do something are two different things. The truth of the matter is that writing, especially writing well, is hard. There is a level of emotional and mental fortitude that it takes to dig in deep and translate the utter chaos of a mind into phrases that grip others so intensely they swear these letters are living and breathing. That they now emotionally invest themselves into these phantom forms of humanity to the point that fictional characters become true life long friends.
In the end of it all, I don’t know if you can truly know beforehand that you were “meant” be be a writer. Just because someone tells you (even multiple people) that you are an amazing story teller or that your life should “totally become a book” that honestly does not mean you were “meant to be a writer.”
I have had people telling me for years that the love the sound of my voice when I read stories and that I would be a phenomenal voice actor. Does that mean I was “meant to be a voice actor?” Absolutely not! I have thought about it, been intrigued by it. But the same level of pining for it has definitely not been there as it has been in my written ventures.
Voice acting, like writing, has a massive amount of work that has to be put into it. From learning how the industry even functions to training and developing your skill set. Now, this isn’t to say you can’t do writing just for yourself and are only meant to focus on producing some level of a career with it. But even in removing the monetary vein of things, all artistic works require a lot of proverbial sweat to grow your initial talents into hard earned skills.
So I believe part of the defining factor that shows you’re “meant to be a writer” is the willingness to purposefully put yourself through some potentially painful growth exercises all in the name of simply wanting your story to exist in its best form possible. Because you want it, not because outsiders expect it.
So no, at the end of the day, I never “knew I was meant to be a writer.” All I do know is that for all the difficulty, for all the times I’ve shut down from it, for all the things I’ve yet to learn, I just can’t stop being drawn back into it. Yes, there are many beautiful and wonderful things about writing, and I love getting to explore my creativity through it. So it’s not all doom and gloom 😆
But overall I’d have to pinpoint this back to the concept that you know you’re a writer because you really, really want to write.