How to Become a Writer Who Writes

How to Become a Writer Who Writes

Dunia Inspirasi, Ilmu & Ikhtiar Sukses: http://ardaiq.blogspot.com

Gertrude Stein wrote, “To write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write.” Who can say what she meant (she also wrote, “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose”), except perhaps exactly what she wrote: that writing is all and everything of it, the beginning and the end. That to write is to write. We just do it. How to get started writing? Write. How to keep going? Write.

Sadly, for many of us it just isn’t that simple. We have trouble getting started, we have trouble keeping the pace and, too often, we simply give up or our enthusiasm and determination trickle away, like a stream petering out.

But because writing is in our hearts and souls and DNA, after a few weeks or months or even years, we’re back at it again. More determined than ever that, this time, we’ll stay with it.Maybe we do and maybe we don’t. In my experience as a teacher, more often than not people don’t stay with it. For some, the cycle repeats and repeats. Because we can’t keep the thing going, we begin to judge ourselves failures at writing, our self-esteem goes the way of our tossed out pages, and after a while, it becomes more and more difficult to begin again.

This is heartbreaking. Because we are writers and when we aren’t being fully and wholly ourselves — when a piece of ourselves is missing — we can never feel at home in the world or at peace within ourselves. Writing is who we are. Not all of who we are, but enough of who we are that when we’re not writing, we’re not whole.