So, you’d like to be a writer?

Start keeping a journal. Everyday write something. Even if, and especially if it’s raw, words that can’t be polished, that take heroic effort to release and get down on the page. No matter how disjointed, incoherent, unappealing your emotional storms may be, –do your best to find some words.

Do not object, “But I must wait till the bleeding stops.”  Push ahead with your best effort.  Good work is often written in blood.

You have a story that you will tell. And your story intersects the story of every other human that lives, or has lived on this earth. Read widely, read everything that strikes your fancy.  Read like your life depends upon it. Let the words of others be your lifeline, and learn who the great authors are and have been, especially the poets.*

Poetry is the act of crystalizing words to their essence, to the greatest purity of thought and emotion that words will bear. Know that there are words enough in a given language adequate to say everything there is to say, in that language. There are as many languages as there are domains of knowledge: the language of astrophysics, of quantum mechanics, of medicine, of psychology, of photography, of anthropology, of politics and of life at this Starbucks where I am now writing this to you.

There is a way of writing that conveys the form of life, the “truth” of a particular “slice” of human experience.

I add these words from Adbusters Magazine that are germane to developing the skill and the attitude of writing well:

Walk away from your computer.

Then take off. Go to India, rural China, Rio, Caracas, Belize. Mingle with the filthy rich and the dirt poor. Dig up all the roots of terror. Make hunger, disease, cruelty, lust, greed, self-preservation and genocide your roommates. Then, when you run out of money and can’t take it anymore, fly back home. Look in the mirror. Face your fears, your weaknesses, strengths, your imminent demise. When all of this begins to gel into a master narrative in front of your eyes——

Adbusters November/December 2019

At that point you will start to write, really write. Trust me. Writing is an act of faith when you begin, that in the process you will discover what it is you have to say. Take courage! You are not different, than every other writer who has picked up a pencil, pen, or laid fingers on a keyboard.

*Here are a few great authors to get you started: John Steinbeck, Homer, Wendell Berry, Annie Dillard, Haruki Murakami, Billy Collins, Mary Oliver, Kurt Vonnegut, Henry David Thoreau, Ranier Maria Rilke