How I Became a Writer

I was very excited when I recognised that writing was part of my calling. It opened up a whole new dimension in my life, that of character and story.

I eagerly recalled all of the story ideas that I had conceived in my past, and they captivated me. As I walked down the silky beach churning sand between my toes, my mind was actually detailing gruesome battle scenes between powerful armies. During work, as I was carelessly waving around bowls of boiling hot mussels above the heads of flustered customers, I was thinking about mighty dragons and their masters.

I spent months in this mode, believing that I was doing something very good for myself by cultivating these stories and characters in my mind. I wasn't aware of it at the time, but as a matter of fact I was infatuated with the stories of my imagination. I couldn't stop thinking about them and talking about them with my close friends. It was like a drug - I had become a junkie and was completely hooked. I was sucked more and more into the vortex, the fantasy. And it was months before I realised the fatal mistake I had made: I was designing an entire fantasy world with leagues of epic characters, but none of if was being written! My 'great' ideas were just castles in the sky.

I was swimming in my own dreams about becoming a writer and writing this magnificent story for the world. But when I tried to meet pen with paper, I drowned every time. I just couldn't seem to write anything, which was unbelievably frustrating.

I needed to do something about this, and one day I faced a dramatic reconciliation. The Prophecy of Pilkenhorn, which had been a friend of my imagination for the past 3 months, was now an enigma that was taunting me. I couldn't go on like this, so I committed to a challenge: I would go down to the Marina cafe every single day, and not leave until I had one page of writing completed. Easy solution, I thought.

It was one of the hardest things I've ever tried to do. Writing just one damned page was like trying to squeeze water out of a brick. I didn't know where to start, or even what to write about. My mind just pondered about, and the empty page stared up at me, unimpressed.

The resistance I felt to writing was like the weight of a million mountains. I told myself I was the worst writer ever, and when I produced some words on the page, my belief was disclosed. I was a hopeless! Through my very own eyes, I was reading the ramblings of a fool - it was excruciating. I went to the cafe feeling hopeful, but I walked away quivering.

Looking back upon this time through hindsight, however, I have discovered that this was all part of the process. In fact, it was the most important part of the process.

I was not going to the cafe every day to get good at writing. This was not the case at all. First and foremost, I needed to BE a writer before I could have any chance of getting better at it. So, before the actual writing itself, I needed to cultivate a HABIT of writing.

I needed to walk the tightrope and REALLY become a writer.

I found this to be a powerful insight into habit building. Sometimes we try to implement habits, and they last for a week or two, but then they kind of taper off, and are left behind in the dust. As stated by the Oxford dictionary, a habit is "a settled or regular tendency or practice, especially one that is hard to give up." So, what I discovered is that:

If you want a new habit to stick, start BASIC, and focus on your ability to actually do the habit first - making the practice habitual. 

You want it to become a daily routine practice, something you are disciplined about, and do as automatically as brushing your teeth. Once it's part of auto-pilot, that's when you can start exploring with the habit, and taking it to new heights.

After about a month into the writing challenge I set myself, I had become somewhat of a writer. I certainly wasn't good at writing, but at least I wrote something on the page. It was something I could work with, and this is precisely where I needed to be. I started to correct some of the problems that I had incurred when I was living life in my thoughts and not word to word on a page.

And as a matter of fact, it wasn't the fantasy stuff that I was writing. I had banished it from my mind for being too much of an anomaly, and closing me off from the entire galaxy of stars. Actually, it was like inception - these fictional stories were happening within another story - the story of my own life! And that's the main story I knew I needed to be focussing on.

And so, I discovered journalling.