What It Really Means To Be A Writer

One of the things I know best is myself. I was lucky enough to discover at a very early age what I wanted to be in life, and that was primarily a writer.

Not a Canadian writer, or a white male writer or a Scottish Italian writer, although I am all those things. I really just wanted to be a writer who could learn to express himself honestly.

This is not as easy as it sounds. Because most writers go through a phase where they are looking for their voice, and so they mimic the voice of the writers they admire.

Me & Bob

I mimicked Bob Dylan for a long time, mainly because I thought that the best way to learn to write like that was to imitate something I thought was very good to genius. Now I knew that wasn’t really going to make me famous or anything close. But at the very least it would be good practice for whatever came next.

I honestly never started out with the intention of writing op/ed articles like this one, or really any of the stuff I have been writing for most of my life.

And there has most certainly been a lot of water under the bridge since my first pathetic attempts at Dylan homage.

But that’s how it goes sometimes. Especially if you are willing to trust your own instincts, move through the phases and refine your voice by learning what you can from everything you try.

Key Insight About Writing

There’s no rule book for becoming a writer. There are books on style and story and all kinds of technical aspects of writing. But the real meat of it all is self-generated.

You have to want it. You have to live it 24/7. And you have to keep writing because if you want it and you live it and you keep on doing it, you will get good at it.

If you are among the very small percentage of people who write with genuine talent, you will get famous for it.

And if you are lucky enough to actually connect with your authentic self and be able to bottle that somehow, you will likely inspire people.

But fame or inspiration, while lofty ideals, are not the goal.

Feeding the beast and keeping it full is the goal. Because writing, like so many other creative endeavors, is an obsession.

If it’s anything less than that in your minds, well then you are just fuckin’ around with it, and you will eventually drift away from it. If it’s just something you’re good at but not obsessed with, you may make a living at it, but you will eventually retire from it.

Writing As Obsession

Writers don’t retire. Because writing is like a marriage with someone you genuinely love. Til death do us part, and all that other stuff.

In my adult life, I have only ever been a writer and I have been lucky enough to have gotten very well paid for a lot of it, to have a career where I am called a writer and have my writing support a family, a comfortable lifestyle in the big city, and an even more comfortable one in a smaller city.

And though I have been at it for a long time, I wake up every day with the distinct feeling that I still have miles to go.

I feel this way because after all these years and all those words and ideas and verses and choruses and screenplays and concepts and ads and commercials and memes and posts the most important thing I have learned is that writing is not about the goal.

It’s about the journey, and I hate that word, because it is so hackneyed.

But it’s the best word to describe the writer’s life. The journey is life long. It is filled with amazing experiences, occasional visions and flashes of brilliance, more frustration than you can imagine, and, for me personally, the desire to lay down something anywhere in the Dylan Ballpark.

I wish I could write you a melody so plain

That would hold you, dear lady, from going insane

That would ease you and cool you and cease the pain

Of your useless and pointless knowledge…

Bob Dylan (Tombstone Blues)

In today’s world, writing is a core skill that everybody needs to have. But for some it’s simply what they were born to do. They would, and often do it for nothing but the pure unbridled joy and sometimes gestalt, of self-expression.

So in answer to the question of what it means to be a writer, I can only speak for myself. And what it means to me, is that I will always, regardless of how many people I reach with it, have an outlet that allows me to keep my feelings from being bottled up inside, and risk an implosion.

And that is my best advice to all of you. Write to express your feelings. Because if you learn how to do that, you will become what is commonly referred to by yet, another hackneyed term, authentic.

Jim is also a former ad agency writer and art director and has run his own creative consultancy, Onwords & Upwords, from 1989 until just recently when he closed and opened a freelance enterprise called MurMarketing.

He lives with his wife, Heather, in the beautiful Niagara area of Ontario and works with a small group of companies that are trying to make a difference in the world.

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