I guess the first step is to declare that you do. “I want to be a writer.” There. Easy. Well … not so easy. The first thing the authors of most books about ‘becoming a professional writer’ try to do is scare you away from the very idea of becoming reclusive monsters like them, complete with horror stories of broken families, heartbreak, total ruin, nervous breakdowns, paltry incomes where they had to eat ramen every day for a month, and other frustrating situations. And if that fails to deter you, they still leave you faced with a tough, life-altering decision.

I actually decided I wanted to be a writer one day when I was mindlessly flipping through TV channels at my wife’s parent’s house. (For the record, I almost never watch TV.) But anyway, there was this interview with J.K. Rowling on. It was the day before Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was going to hit the shelves. A large chunk of the world was trembling in drooly anticipation for their copies. I remember there being a … let’s call it a ‘suspicious modesty’ … about her as she bounced from question to question. But the interviewer was incredibly savvy at slipping in difficult questions making them seem like innocent follow-ups using the ‘foot-in-the-door’ technique, and, before she knew it, Rowling was transported back to her past. She found herself talking about her beginnings; writing the first Harry Potter book on a typewriter in an upstairs apartment, weeks away from being evicted. About how she came up with the idea for the book randomly on a train ride one day, with just a name at the tip of her tongue: “Harry”, and a vague idea that he would attend some kind of magic school. About how the rest of the story came with a lot of hard work and conviction. It was amazing. Then, I found myself wondering how many times I had dismissed my own ‘Harry’ ideas. And, most importantly, I remember thinking, “If she can do it, why can’t I?”.

But then a Deathly follow-up question creeped up on me. And it was: “What do -I- have to offer to the world of literature?”

At first, I jokingly thought (and I mean no disrespect to J.K. Rowling when I say this): “For starters, I can write books where it would be impossible to find characters with names like Charles Buggerweasel.”
Seriously though, it takes a lot of soul searching to overcome such a weighted question. And it can be extremely intimidating for a fledgling writer like me to read all of the amazing authors out there who are professionally edited and end up sounding like super-genius virtuosos. But I absolutely, positively needed a serious answer to that question in order to, in good faith, continue. And the answer to that question, at least for me, finally came. Thankfully, it turned out to be simply: “My point of view“. A story told from any other point of view is … a different story. And the more I thought about it, the more it rang true. Ask yourself: How many completely different stories can be told about a traffic accident? It depends on how many people were in each car. And how many eyewitnesses were present. And how many journalists wrote about it. So it should stand to reason that nobody has ever read the exact same books in the exact same order as I have. And certainly, nobody has ever mentally processed any of those stories and gotten the same meaning out of them as I have. Furthermore, nobody has ever written words in the exact same order I am writing them now. Don’t believe me? Try doing a Google search or a Google Book search on a random quote from your favorite published author. Unless it’s a cliché or a very generalized statement, I guarantee you will only find one instance of that quote.

Let’s give it a try:

‘Your search – “nobody has ever written words in the exact same order I am writing them now” – did not match any documents.’
As long as you write from your heart, this should always be true. Quite a shocking revelation for me. Hopefully it will be for you, too. It was what allowed me to continue in confidence.

And I’m willing to bet that none of the classic literary authors that most of us were forced to read in high school or in Lit 110 had even the tiniest inkling of what it would be like to live in a culture where almost everybody is expected to go to college to succeed and have to pay back their loans over a projected period of fifteen years. Or what it would be like to walk into a dance club pulsing with trance music timed to electronic lights designed to wash across your senses. Or what it would be like to get lost in an MMORPG world during a dungeon crawl and wonder if you can get a ‘corpse recovery’ if you don’t manage to make it out alive. Or what it would be like to text message “LOL!” to the other side of the world from a cell phone in the middle of nowhere.

I think the reason reading classic literature can tend to be a boring chore for most students is, while the authors of olde certainly deserve credit for having done something ‘first’, they were written for cultures that only existed at the time the book was written. Cultures that will never, ever exist again. Because culture always evolves with time. Even if a modern author doesn’t want to admit it, all of the culture in our society – even text messaging – has profound influences on our writing on some, and perhaps every, level – even if said author only writes period pieces and passionately loathes text messaging. If you ever want to know the history of any given country during any given time period, take a look at the culture. For example, if there was a war tearing the country apart at the time, I can almost guarantee you will find all of the very real pain and suffering the people of that war experienced, all deeply embedded throughout the books and music that were popular at the time.

Apparently, the next thing an aspiring writer must overcome is to figure out how to write from their heart. Never, never, never, just for money. Sure, every writer has delusions of grandeur to some extent, imagining getting movie deals, etc. But if you write a book with a specific genre simply because you think it will be the easiest to write or make the most money, it will show. And it seems all the publishing agents out there have the uncanny ability to sniff out transcripts by authors that do just that, tossing those stories straight to their slush pile. The idea is that if you do what you love, a readership of people with a lot in common with you will naturally gravitate to you. I’m told that, at book-signings, people have so much in common with the author that a lot of them become instant friends. If you never make a living out of doing what you love, so what? But if you never make a living doing what you don’t love, that’s a problem. So if you love romance novels, write romance. Sci-fi? Write about interplanetary travel – No matter what the readership market share looks like right now. My passion lies specifically with the niche market of high fantasy. Not fantasy. Not horror. Not science fiction. High fantasy. So I will try my best to spill out my soul, laughing and crying right along with the unlikely heroes that will traverse dangerous worlds of my own design, as I passionately try to pay forward to my readership all of the drama, romance, wonderment, magic, and whimsy that other writers selflessly passed on to me. And hopefully, it will show.

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