Well, here goes.
*deep breath*
I am a writer.
*exhale*
I never allow myself to think like that, I never allow myself to say it, and I definitely never write it down and put it up on the net so that other people can point and laugh. Haha. Writer indeed.
It's simpler to just say something like 'I dabble...' or 'I'm interested in...'; less mortifying than having people find out my gmail ID.(which is an open secret among my friends, just another silly pet name)
But if I never believe in it myself, how the hell am I going to convince people to read what I write? Sometimes I wonder if all that nonsense on being true to an art form is real, if all I'll ever be is a penner of short stories to make people around me laugh. Sometimes I think I'm being unrealistic, that even those little dreams I have; of completing a novel, of rewriting until I'm happy with every little piece of it, are never going to happen. I know the ratios, I know how many people dream of writing best-selling books and how many truly achieve success. It's not easy, and I've never yet done anything I've set out to do in completion. Take the summer project I'm meant to be doing, for example. Didn't even start. My failed attempts at learning the violin and playing squash. Maybe I'm just not cut out for doing something with my life.
Someone told me once that maybe I'm meant to be a short-story writer. Well, I'm sorry, but I think you have no idea. I want to write, I'm willing to give up years and years worth of doing anything else, anything 'productive', to bang out words on different types of computers, different interfaces, even different word-processing softwares. I'm willing to spend hundreds of thousands of hours doing nothing but thinking about characters and people, putting them in places and putting words in their mouths. And none of this may make sense to you, I may look like an inveterate slacker who likes to 'dream' her life away, but I'm serious about this as I've never been about anything else. It is the only thing I can imagine doing for the rest of my life, without rest, without boredom, and without external prodding.
And if someone like me, a general all-round waster, can put all this effort into something, then I can darn well be whatever it is I want to be, short-story writer or novelist, or even poet(though not really. I can't rhyme or anything).
So that's it. I'm going to be a writer. All those flippant promises are going to mean something. They do already.
BdK.
P.S. This post doesn't, in fact, come from out of nowhere. Recently(very recently) I came into possession of the holy grail of all notebook nerds(like yours truly): a Moleskine notebook. And everyone I know thought I was completely mad for spending that much on a notebook for my ideas. What ideas, indeed.
*deep breath*
I am a writer.
*exhale*
I never allow myself to think like that, I never allow myself to say it, and I definitely never write it down and put it up on the net so that other people can point and laugh. Haha. Writer indeed.
It's simpler to just say something like 'I dabble...' or 'I'm interested in...'; less mortifying than having people find out my gmail ID.(which is an open secret among my friends, just another silly pet name)
But if I never believe in it myself, how the hell am I going to convince people to read what I write? Sometimes I wonder if all that nonsense on being true to an art form is real, if all I'll ever be is a penner of short stories to make people around me laugh. Sometimes I think I'm being unrealistic, that even those little dreams I have; of completing a novel, of rewriting until I'm happy with every little piece of it, are never going to happen. I know the ratios, I know how many people dream of writing best-selling books and how many truly achieve success. It's not easy, and I've never yet done anything I've set out to do in completion. Take the summer project I'm meant to be doing, for example. Didn't even start. My failed attempts at learning the violin and playing squash. Maybe I'm just not cut out for doing something with my life.
Someone told me once that maybe I'm meant to be a short-story writer. Well, I'm sorry, but I think you have no idea. I want to write, I'm willing to give up years and years worth of doing anything else, anything 'productive', to bang out words on different types of computers, different interfaces, even different word-processing softwares. I'm willing to spend hundreds of thousands of hours doing nothing but thinking about characters and people, putting them in places and putting words in their mouths. And none of this may make sense to you, I may look like an inveterate slacker who likes to 'dream' her life away, but I'm serious about this as I've never been about anything else. It is the only thing I can imagine doing for the rest of my life, without rest, without boredom, and without external prodding.
And if someone like me, a general all-round waster, can put all this effort into something, then I can darn well be whatever it is I want to be, short-story writer or novelist, or even poet(though not really. I can't rhyme or anything).
So that's it. I'm going to be a writer. All those flippant promises are going to mean something. They do already.
BdK.
P.S. This post doesn't, in fact, come from out of nowhere. Recently(very recently) I came into possession of the holy grail of all notebook nerds(like yours truly): a Moleskine notebook. And everyone I know thought I was completely mad for spending that much on a notebook for my ideas. What ideas, indeed.
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