How to become a writer (according to someone who's not)
Based on Lorrie Moore’s 1985 piece. I wrote this piece while participating in a Write It Down! retreat in Spain over the summer of 2021.
Fast forward, then put a pin in this: Book a writing retreat in Spain to help you make peace with yourself. This peace, you know, is what you need to write. To write often. To write well. To write with confidence. To write at all.
Rewind. Childhood.
Be sure to take yourself too seriously, refuse to be a child. Longing for adulthood when it’s 10+ years away will make you feel a desperate loneliness that’s good for writing. Find a way to express this loneliness, to get it out of you, even if it isn’t with pen and paper. Might I suggest pacing back and forth in the family living room, recounting everything that happened in a day while holding a purple jump rope? You’re not talking to this jump rope, even though it looks this way to your family and they like to embarrass you about it. No, you only hold the jump rope because you need to get used to the feeling of holding something in your hand while you try to get these feelings out (one day it will be a pen).
These feelings, this habit, will set you apart from all your friends. You’ll never feel close to anyone. This is good for writing, even if you haven’t discovered writing yet.
In 3rd grade, write a 5-page story using all the spelling words from the week. Mrs. Banko will put the idea in your head that a writer is something you could become. Quickly forget that you ever wanted to be a ventriloquist, an actress, a curator of reptiles. A writer—it sounded so practical, yet so fantastical.
At 9, being a writer meant competing with a boy in your class, Dustin, to see who could write the longest stories, book reports, persuasive essays. The quality of language didn’t matter; just the number of filled notebook pages.
While growing up don’t do any writing, don’t write a word. Let it become the alto saxophone: another instrument you don’t practice. At the same time it’s something you aspire to because it represents culture, sophistication, dinner parties, conversations with other famous writers. It represents a life you’re sure you would have if you could just grow up already, shed off childhood like an itchy sweater.
Might I recommend reading The Diary of Anne Frank at 11 and letting her become the ghost that haunts you for life? You’ll start keeping diaries, filling them with utter bullshit because your own life isn’t anything that anyone would want to read about. You regret this now because when you go back to reread these diaries, you find that your past has been completely fabricated.
Be a weirdo. Actually believe that you’re meant to live out the rest of Anne Frank’s life for her and become the writer she wanted to be.
In high school you’ll read a biography of Anne Frank, and there will be a quote from Miep Gies about how she once walked in on Anne in the midst of writing that really sticks with you. Miep described the look of intensity that was on Anne’s face, like she had a headache. That’s when you’ll learn that writing is work, writing is discipline, writing is intensity.
But you’re getting too far ahead of yourself. You mustn’t leave out the eating disorder that started at 12. It’s kept you from living an embodied life all these years, from discovering who you are and who you can be.
It’s taken years of therapy and many relapses to land you here. In Spain. On a couch in a conservatory overlooking a beautiful hillside in a Spanish afternoon sunset. That’s still too far ahead.
Go back to England. Lewes, England, to be exact. The happiest you’ve ever been. You’re 22, finishing college, not sure if you can write. So you take a creative writing course based on Virginia Woolf’s (who you’re obsessed with) writing schedule to prove it to yourself.
While in England, you write a short story about an elderly British couple. They’re artists. The wife is more talented than the husband, who is a very boring and traditional painter. You realize that you’ve modeled the wife on Lily Briscoe from Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. In the couple’s old age, the wife has taken up posing nude to inspire her husband’s painting. He’s losing his eyesight (his vision), you see.
Your professor tells you there’s something in the story that needs to be developed more. You never revisit it.
You go through more of your life thinking you’ll be a writer, telling other people this, as well. But you don’t actually know how to become a writer. You know less about how to make a living as one.
So you go to China where you teach English, get drunk all the time, earn a Master’s degree in International Relations. You write emails home about your experiences that everyone says they enjoy reading. You think that maybe travel writing is in your future. You could be like Anthony Bourdain. But you don’t stay in China. You go home, lie about being a student to get an internship at CNN, and decide that you’ll be a journalist.
CNN likes you enough to let you freelance, but journalism is all about paying your dues, and you don’t want to do that. You just want to see the world and write about it. So you say.
You publish pieces here and there, you self-publish a children’s book, but you don’t feel like you have any direction. You want the career of every other writer you’ve read about, ignoring the fact that it took them years of work to get those careers.
One drunken Sunday afternoon, you go with a friend to a tattoo parlor to get your very first tattoo. Something small, a little edge that no one would expect from you. your meager savings allow for the word “Write” to be tattooed in cursive on your left wrist. A flesh post-it to remind you to write, or to remind you that you’re not doing what you want to be doing.
You’ll grow to hate that tattoo. You’d rather people not ask you about it and often cover it with a wrist watch.
Forget about writing. Continue to take jobs and start projects that pull you further away from what you want to be your truth.
When people ask you what you like to write, don’t forget to preface “writer” with “trying to be.” Your lack of published work might not seem so unimpressive if you can prove that you’re trying.
Be honest with yourself: How long can you go on trying to be something (you’re not)?
Live through a COVID lockdown.
End the longest relationship you’ve ever had.
Abandon everything and anything that won’t lead you back to writing.
Finally: Book a writing retreat in Spain to help you make peace with yourself. This peace, you know, is what you need to write.
Before long, maybe you won’t just be trying to be a writer. You’ll discover the true meaning of writing.