Picture the scene.
You’re sitting in a pavement café, sipping coffee, thinking big thoughts. Your notebook is open on the table in front of you. The sun is shining.
The waiter brings you another coffee. You sigh and think about the big, fat advance that is sitting in your bank account. You’re practically being paid to sip coffee and write your next book.
You are finally a writer. A real writer.
Cut to this.
‘I’ve never published anything – and I’m not sure I ever will – so I really don’t think of myself as a writer.’
‘I’m not a real writer, not in that sense of the word.’
‘It feels a bit pretentious to call myself a writer.’
The images that we form in our minds of what being a writer – a real writer – looks like and feels like can be very limiting.
The truth is that I’ve never met anyone who feels that they’ve truly arrived as a real and proper writer. No, not even the best-selling, million-copy-shifting novelists. (They often think their best-selling 'commercial' fiction isn’t ‘proper’ fiction.)
Not even the prize-winning poets. (The ones I've met are usually terrified that it will take them ten years to produce their next collection and, by then, they’ll have lost their publisher and possibly their university teaching post.)
So what does it mean to be a ‘real writer’? Who are these exotic creatures? Where are they (when they are not sitting outside Paris cafés) and what do they write?
What do ‘real Writers,’ the ones with a capital-W, look like? Close your eyes for a moment. What do you see?
For many of us, what comes to mind are those grainy, black and white photos of famous writers banging away at their typewriters, often with a cigarette wedged between their lips and a glass of whisky at their elbow. Sometimes with big hats and sunglasses. Or bare-chested in boxer shorts. Perhaps in a room spilling with books; or with the typewriter between their thighs on a wicker lounge chair in the sun; or gazing out of an open window at a wide vista: waves, mountains, a tumble of roses.
You know the sort of photos I mean: Ernest Hemingway, Henry Miller, Dorothy Parker, William Burroughs, Joan Didion, Gloria Steinem. This kind of thing. (The Guardian has permission and I don’t.)
The kinds of images we have been fed for decades about writers and writing and creativity can be very limiting.
For example, your desk doesn’t need to look like this in order for you to be a creative person. Mine most definitely doesn’t.
You don’t have to write a published ‘thing.’
Writing isn’t only about product - the book, the chapter, the online essay, the article, the Instagram post of the finished book, essay, article.
Writing isn’t only the edited lines that might eventully be read by others. It is also the scribbled ideas, the outlines, the doodles, the ‘morning pages,’ the unfinished Google Docs, the box of unsent letters, the drawer full of journals.
For some of us, writing is a fiercely private activity. We need to know that we’re never - and I mean, not ever - going to share what emerges. Writing is simply what we do to make sense of our lives.
It’s the process of picking up the pen or moving our hands over the keyboard. Our feelings are filmy or slippery things inside of us. But then we get them onto the page and somehow they feel easier to grasp and shape or put aside.
Some of us need to do two very distinct kinds of writing: the private writing that no one else will ever read as well as the writing that we put out into the world. Some of us need to oscillate between the two. When I wrote my first novel, The Dress, I told myself that I was only writing it for me and that no one else would ever see it. This was how I managed to make the space to experiment. Inside my mind, I created a kind, supportive reader - a playful part of myself - and I wrote only to that imagined reader.
Some of us know that we will never want to share any of our work. Writing is our safe space, our retreat, our place to soothe ourselves or say what we can never say out loud. Writing secretly for ourselves is the entire point of writing.
Writing is a way of experiencing the world.
Whether we write privately in a journal or publicly towards a published manuscript – or perhaps a little of both – I think we can choose to be writers and to see our lives through the lens of our writing. In this sense, writing is a position, a point of view. It happens not just at our desk or in the pages of a notebook but in the shower or when we’re driving to work or walking the dog or cooking dinner or in that moment between waking and sleeping.
To experience the world through writing is to slow down and notice that particular slant of light through the trees at the end of the street, or the way this person bends to pick up her bag of shopping, and file these details away for later.
When we do any of these things, we are writers in our bodies as well as in our minds.
As Pat Schneider writes in Writing Alone and With Others (2003, Oxford University Press):
‘Everyone is a writer. You are a writer. All over the world, in every culture, human beings have carved into stone, written on parchment, birch bark, or scraps of paper, and sealed into letters — their words. Those who do not write stories and poems on solid surfaces tell them, sing them, and, in so doing, write them on the air. Creating with words is our continuing passion.’
Getting clear about why you write and what you need or want your writing to be – for you, in your own life – can be very helpful.
Why not try this Writing Experiment?
Use these sentences as starting points for some timed writing. Setting a timer for five minutes can help you to write quickly, without over-thinking or getting bogged down in the detail. Find out what happens.
When I’m writing, I feel … and … and…
I feel like a writer when…
My writing feels really good when…
In five years time, what I want to feel about my writing is…
Now, take some time to read back over what you’ve written.
How does this feel to you now? What did you find out?
I believe that if you’re writing, you are a writer.
No one gets to tell you otherwise.
What's more, our private creative practice is our resistance against the relentless machinery of so much of our lives, the big tech, the AI sludge, the relentless performativity.
If you'd like to join a supportive group of writers (published and unpublished) exploring writing as collective kindness, equity, justice and joy, I'd love to welcome you to WRITE! Club. Find out more here.
