How to Be a Writer Part 4

Many writers are full of enthusiasm for life, even if their real lives are hard or bogged down in some way. Part of a writer’s mind wants to play at everything. And if we work with this, we can get further in terms of getting things done and running a writing career.

1. Let Yourself Win!

Life is going to throw various obstacles in a writer’s way soon enough — what you need is your ‘inner writer’ winning and wanting to write more, not an upset or blocked imagination which feels thwarted and will soon lose interest in the game altogether. Winning writers want to keep on writing! So go easy on yourself, set do-able targets and make sure that you don’t set expectations too high, especially at the beginning. Soon, momentum will build.

2 Education, Education, Education

For writers, education can be virtually continuous. Observing people, spotting colours and emotional textures, arranging words in the right order, plenty of opportunities arise in daily life for observing and applying basic knowledge. Be open to the world around you at all times: the smallest incident observed from the greatest distance can be the seed of another story or part of a bigger one.

3. Use Magazines

A wide variety of magazines is available from most newsagents, all of them full of interesting stuff. Most writers are very willing to learn. The trick is to keep the gradient low enough so that they are continually winning and able to convert observations into working fiction.

4. Praise, Praise, Praise!

You should heap praise on a writer whenever he or she gets something published or finished, and brush off or make light of anything that you see as wrong. This boosts their confidence quickly — and your own, strangely enough. Praise keeps a writer wanting to play the writing game. Admiration is perhaps the most sought after commodity in this universe.

5. Reward Everything Good

In line with all of the above, you can’t go wrong if you reward anything positive that you do. This can be in the form of small breaks, time doing a favourite activity, an outing, a magazine (see above) and so on. When a writer’s life is full of rewards, then he or she reaches to do more and try more; if there are few or perhaps no incentives, writers tend to lack motivation and lose interest.

Ideally, you want to associate learning and doing the ‘write’ thing with good things, more fun. Then writing itself becomes a joy and you have started a writer off on the road to a writing career.