A friend once asked me how he could become a good writer but quickly followed it with one common question I am afraid I often ask myself: can I be a writer?
Then I came across a post on thestar website on when authors decided that they will be writers and I just hope my friend is reading this.
The interview began with Sarah Bailey who wrote The Dark Lake, though having the urge since she was 5 years of age, she had to wait 30 more years to first get published and during those years she had wanted to be a vet and even did 13 years in advertising. Then there is David Bouchet writer of Sun of a Distant Land, David said it was actually a friend back in the 90’s who found his text interesting and started encouraging him to write more. Rachel Manley said she has been first called a port by her Grandmother but later she was told that she wrote prose not poetry but after publishing her book The Black Peacock she is still not certain and expects to be told that she has morphed into something again. Bianca Marais who faced rejections when she was a child from a teacher who she handed her first story to and again by the public twenty years later after publishing two books but her book Hum If You Don’t Know The Words cemented her decision to be a writer despite rejections.
There are many more interviews on the page but the headliner remains that no one was visibly anointed to be ‘a very good writer’, it happened because they all got attention. Writing will remain a journey and though rejections are the cruelest of heartbreaks, not stopping (at least not entirely) is what makes one a writer.
Who decides if one is a writer or not? I still don’t know how to answer that.
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