The One True Way October 28, 2021 Gather 'round the fire, my children, and I'll tell you the one true way to be a writer. All you have to do is...no, wait. All you have to do is...no, that's not it either. All you have to do.... As you may have guessed, there's no one true way. Your background has nothing to do with it. There have been writers who knew what they wanted to be since the age of five. There have been writers who kept their day jobs while they wrote. Among them have been government bureaucrats (Anthony Trollope), physicians (Lewis Thomas, Oliver Sacks), and insurance executives (Wallace Stevens, Tom Clancy). Education has nothing to do with being a writer. Tolkien was an Oxford professor; Mark Twain left school after the fifth grade. Nor does a writing education make you a writer. Some have had PhDs in English, some extensive workshop experience, while others have been entirely self-taught. There's no particular time to write that will make you a writer. Trollope wrote first thing, before going to work; Balzac only after midnight. Nor is there a particular place to be a writer. Writers have worked on a board placed on their laps while sitting in a drawing room, at tables in corners, in a library or study, or even in a shed/house/hotel room devoted only to writing. Speed or being prolific doesn't make you a writer, either. Isaac Asimov had dozens of books to his credit; Thomas Harris has written six so far. (Though with books like "Silence of the Lambs" you don't need many to be successful....) James Joyce was glacially slow, while Georges Simenon could crank out a mystery novel in a just a week. How to write is simply finding a way that suits you best. That might be daily practice or frenzied bursts of activity punctuated by reading and research. That might be longhand with a goose quill on handmade paper or using a brand-new laptop. The how--finding out what works best for you--actually takes a lot of effort, because no one can tell you. You have to discover it for yourself through trial and error. Now that I think about it, though, there really is only one true way to be a writer--and that's to write. (c) 2021 by Andrew Gudgel email: contact [at] andrewgudgel.com