How To Become A Writer

          How To Become A Writer

Learn to Listen

Learn to Speak

Learn to Read

Learn to Write

          When people become writers they define a new reality for themselves.  As long as these erstwhile ordinary people continue to write they are writers, if they stop writing, they cease to be writers.  The state of not writing compared to the state of writing is the difference between paralysis and mobility.  At the outset the proficiency of the writing is irrelevant; a new writer sheds paralysis in the act of writing, not in the quality of it.  It doesn’t matter whether the mobile person can sprint but only that they aren’t paralysed.    New writers must exuviate their fear of writing; even bad writing is a step toward personal freedom.  I hope to convince you that the age of separation between those who can write and those who can’t can come to an end.  Consider this manifesto as a road-map to self-liberation through writing. 

          Step 1.  Learn to listen

          The act of listening is one of three precursors to becoming a writer.  In learning to listen you must first understand the distinction between listening and hearing.  In listening we can discern tone, nuance, pitch, rhythm, urgency and a whole host of other things.  Hearing is simply the ability to detect noise.  So writing is a partial product of listening, learn to listen and you drive forward your potential to learn to write.  Learn to listen well and your potential to write with cogency and engagement increases exponentially.  Listening is one of a writer’s key skills.  It’s not just about listening to the beauty of the natural world either; bird-song, thunder, fire, wind and rain or all the other fundamentals that scaffold our temporality, although these things are undeniably affecting and beautiful.  It’s not about listening to the words of great poets and authors that might leap at you from the page carrying knives or flowers or both.  It’s not about listening to the spoken word no matter how convincing it is, or how strong the conviction of the speaker might be.  It is all these things and much more. 

          Learn to listen to the stories of your family.  Learn to listen to the stories of friends and strangers (especially strangers).  Listen to the stories that reside in windows, doors, pictures, vagrants, furniture and cats.  Listen to the stories of all creatures but above all learn to listen to yourself.  Your inner-voice is the most important voice, yet it is the one that is the most difficult to make sense of.  The inner-voice of the new writer seems scrambled and encoded, a tempest of messages that refuse to be tamed, captured, understood or ordered.  When your inner-voice speaks during the mute night, or as you watch your love, when it speaks to you in the moment of the extremis of your grief it can go unnoticed.  It is camouflaged, masked from you because of its very familiarity.  In these moments learn to discern it anew, treat it as the voice of a sentient stranger and it will tell you fantastical stories and reveal  dark secrets.  Be non-judgemental (that can come later) about what it says to you no matter how outlandish, extreme, terrifying, nonsensical or ridiculous that it may seem.  Reactive judgement will dull your ear and dilute your sensitivity.  What you hear may well be of no value but decisions of its worth at this stage are unimportant.

          These things, all the things that we can listen to, form part of the foundation that you will come to rely on as a writer.  Those who lack the ability or willingness to listen will struggle to find their physical or metaphorical voice.

          Step 2.  Learn to speak

          Begin to talk to yourself out loud and be assured that it is not a developing symptom of acute psychosis.  Ramble through words when you push the children on a swing, say a word (any will do) with every pendulum back and forth that they make.  Imitate the noise of their childish communication and forge it into a secret language that only you and they can understand.  Make up sounds that mirror the swings momentum and change them to mirror the action of the see-saw and then the slide (remember, it’s important to listen to the play equipment’s stories too).  It’s a difficult skill but one that with perseverance you will learn.  Change the sounds into intelligible words, say them aloud.  Say them to your dog – or to a stranger’s dog.  Hold conversations with the car’s radio as you drive yourself somewhere.  Laugh at the mutual lunacy that it and you create and then create some more.  Recite place names, subvert prayers, shout aphorisms, straplines and punchlines, recite the best bits of Ehrmann’s Desiderata and Luther-King’s Washington address, all out loud of course.  Tell yourself the story of The Three Little Pigs and spin it to show a noble, wronged wolf and the pigs as a triumvirate of little feckers. 

          Play with words, play with the sound of words, play with the sound of sounds.  Iterate strings of obscenities pursued by strings of joyous blessing, alternate between one and the other. Recognise the antonyms (you’re still listening remember).  When you can talk to yourself with confidence and you begin to like the sounds that you are making you are getting to the point where you might try experimenting by speaking to someone else.  Test yourself.  See the reaction that different speech, message and delivery engenders.  Purposefully, consciously and gratuitously manipulate what you say and how you say it and learn that this will in turn manipulate the listeners.  Observe and understand their reactions.  Refine things over time and detect the moment when people move from just hearing the sound of your voice to listening to its message.  That transition represents a paradigm shift, you are now able engage and influence.  You memory of this moment will retain the longevity of the memory of your first love. 

          Step 3.  Learn to read

          Start with cereal boxes and progress on to your children’s books.  Read the mundane and perfunctory with a bright eye and ignore the artless drudgery of info-speak.  Rather, engage with the pleasure of the words for their own sake.  Discover the mind journeys inspired by ‘Honey Nut’ ‘Calcium’ ‘Frosted Yoghurt’ ‘Sorghum’ and build delightful and dark thoughts from them (this is an important step).  Read the best lines from your children’s story books and develop your ability to disassemble them (remember the three fecking pigs?).  Learn to read beyond the point where you currently have to fake your cultural credentials.  Actually read the books that you have pretended to others that you have read.  Skim chapters, dissect a single simple sentence word by word, letter by letter, syllable by syllable. 

          Learn to develop your ability to recognise that interpretation of meaning is suggested by the words not superimposed on you by them.  Just as you learned to listen without preconception in a non-judgemental way so you must do the same when reading.  Eschew the immediacy of your reaction in favour of a willingness to suspend judgement until you have understood what you have read in its entirety.  Understand that the author requires that you enter into an unspoken, unwritten agreement to engage.  That is the deal that you will have to strike if you want to learn how to read; if you aren’t prepared to make that deal be prepared to not to learn how to write but agree to it and you’ll gain the ability to create life and to resurrect the dead.  Learning to read turns you into a God.

          Now if you have managed to take possession of these three key-skills and developed them beyond the perfunctory, it is time for you to move on. 

          Step 4.  Learn to Write.

          Your good ear has begun to allow you to collect the ephemera of the world that surrounds you, a store to be drawn on.  You will already have told some of these stories through speech and you should have managed to assay the reactions and emotions that your words engendered.  You may care to compare your own spoken stories with some of the stories that you have read in terms of content and feeling.  You may be in a position to weigh one against the other.  Choose one of the circumstances that you recall having told someone about.  It may seem mundane and uninteresting but put these self-criticisms out of your mind.  Choose simply to write down the circumstance that you are recalling.  The methodology that you choose should be one that suits you, as should the time and place.  Write for as long as you want to.  Try to remain undisturbed and in a state of concentration.  When you have finished stop. 

          Congratulations.

          Take a short break and then read what you have written but do not stand in self-judgement.  The quality of what you have created is irrelevant (although you will not understand this) the fact of having written is only thing that matters at this stage.  You may be pleased or you may be disappointed with the results of your efforts and there are arguments to be made for which condition is best to find oneself in but simply, you have moved from a state of paralysis.   Put the writing away and take a break.  Your thoughts will return to what you have written, this is natural and known as ‘reflective practice’.  Time spent away from the act of writing is not a state of non-writing, it is almost as important as the act of writing itself.  Only if there is no writing and no reflection does the paralysis of ‘non-writing’ re-establish itself. 

          Consider words as bricks to a builder, paint to an artist or plants to a gardener.  Words are the one dimensional blocks from what you must craft a multidimensional world.  As the apprentice brick layer would not to conceive to build a magnificent palace neither should the novice writer seek to create a great literary work.  A simple column of bricks from which a gate can swing straight and true is in itself a thing of beauty, pitched vertical, edges sharp and symmetrical.  A few sentences of balanced words and meaning, moving simply from one idea to another is equally a thing of worth and beauty.  When you return to your writing think about why you chose certain words in preference to others.  Review the passage that you created in light of your reflections, respond with any revision that you think may afford more development.  It is the beginning of a multi-layered collection of stored experience (some might say ‘skills’) that will serve to inform your craft.  Soon your ability will grow beyond being able to create perfect gate posts.  

          Write another passage.  It may be related to what you have already written or not.   At this early stage of being a writer the most important thing is to get the words down.  Let them tumble out in a great stampede, rounding them up and corralling them can be left till later.  Here, the point is to build your understanding that your words can be written and that what you write is no less worthy than what anyone else writes.  When you start to understand this expect to feel a wondrous sense of liberation.    

          Writing sets you completely free and this is perhaps its greatest gift.  It is a freedom born of a sense of empowerment.  By writing you will see old things anew; objects, people events and a vast host of memories will take on newer, clearer meanings.  As a writer you enjoy a unique position of being able to subvert and bend thoughts into a new reality that you can occupy and be in control of.  At other times you will simply be dragged along as an unwitting passenger caught up in a joy ride

          Welcome to the world of writing.