If You Want to Be a Writer
People ask me how I write so much, and I simply answer "I can't help it."
I opened a channel for creation, and I open it every day, fingers on keyboard, marker on paper. I’ve been doing it since I was a child. I’ve taken months and years off.
This is my only advice for anyone who wants to write: write.
Get a pen or a marker you love and write in a way you love. There are no rules. Write one word per page. Write all capitals. Write however you got in trouble for writing as a kid. WASTE materials. RUIN beautiful journals. Write in a place you love, with tools you love, love the position your body is in.
Get a notebook you love, paper, poster board, a wall scroll, a device you love, a keyboard you love. (I'm personally so obsessed with my ReMarkable tablets that like ten people have bought them after seeing me with one.)
Let any words flow through you. Re-copy the words of writers and thinkers you admire, decorate the letters, think of drawing the words rather than writing them.
People call me prolific for what I publish, and it's about 10% of what I write. Write what no one will see, write what you would never show anyone, write a letter to every person you have ever known and don't send a one of them.
My life is what it is today because I have focused relentlessly for ten years on the beingness, the ontology of my day to day, living into the question, How do I want to spend my time?
Day to day, a writer comes to a document, a database, a notebook, a leaf of paper, a notecard, and makes marks upon it, marks of questionable coherence. This is the beingness of being a writer.
Day to day, a writer thinks and feels every way about their writing. Feeling shame, vulnerability, alienation, joy, disdain, awe, gratitude. Thinking that it's trash, that it's genius, that it's beautiful, that it's ugly. This is the beingness of being a writer.
Do you want to BE a writer? This is the beingness. If you find you don't want to be doing writer things, you might just be in love with a fantasy of having your best ideas presented perfectly in writing. Hold onto that. It's the only place it's available.
