One of the most annoying questions people ask me when I say that I’m a writer is, What have you published? While I can counter that parry because I’ve published a lot (two novels from major houses, upcoming short story collection from a smaller press, poetry chapbook, and numerous poems, stories, articles and essays in newspapers and literary journals) I don’t consider myself any more or less of a writer than someone who hasn’t published.
As my writing mentor, the late Pat Schneider, founder of Amherst Writers & Artists put it: A writer is someone who writes. Period.
If you are driven to put words on paper to try to make sense of your inner and/or outer worlds, or because there’s something inside you that you are driving to express, you are a writer. And what you have to say matters.
This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t strive to make the pieces you write more vivid compelling, clear, unique, original, and powerful. When I play the piano, I have no need to be in a musical spotlight, I just want an outlet to express the deep feelings the music holds within. But it’s still important for me to drill and practice so I can do this more effectively. There are many craft elements from conceptualizing a book-length project to writing a perfect sentence that are absolutely essential to learn and practice, even if they take a lifetime to master, or even if we can never fully master them. This likely means that, like me, you may have days or weeks or months of metaphorically banging your head against the wall trying to wrestle your incoherent thoughts into a pattern of words that flows smoothly on the page. That’s what makes you a writer–not whether some public entity casts a yay or nay on whatever you ultimately offer them.
Being published is a choice. (At least, it’s a choice of whether or not you want to try to get your work published.) Some writers might prefer to write only for themselves, or to share with friends and loved ones. And some writers choose to publish themselves–which opens up a whole other set of issues I’ll write about in a future post. But in the meantime, don’t downgrade yourself if your publishing credentials aren’t as good as you might want them to be. Keep going for that authentic nugget of your own truth and making it sing.
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