People will tell you to quit as much as they tell you to look both ways before crossing the street. Most people don't have the heart to be a writer. Most people don't have the patience. It is hard work, make no doubt. It requires diligence, patience and perhaps most importantly: passion. A passionless person creates passionless art, which inspires emotion from no one. Writing isn't a job, it's a lifestyle, it's a calling. It's bleeding.
You will have teachers that will instill a love of writing in you. It will be a fire that burns hot. You will write stories that have promise and poems that sting with emotion. You will write them with the eager enthusiasm of a young protégé. Sometimes you will be lucky, your teachers will be friends or mentors who will read your writing and make comments, draw smiley faces in the margins, cross out extraneous words. Most of the time, your teachers will never know you exist. They will be books, ideas of writers who came and went before you. They will be yourself as a child, they will be girls who sit two rows down from you in chemistry class and walk like poetry.
You will often read this piece of advice: write every day. It's a noble adage, a great ideal and represents the type of writer many of us would like to be. The good kind of writer, the Fitzgerald and not the Hemingway. But creativity isn't like that. Creativity ebbs and flows. It comes like the moon, one night full and bold, the next wane and weak. Write every day if you can, but you are still a writer even if your fingers are still when pressed to paper.
In most areas of your life, when it hurts, stop. In writing, when it hurts, you've just scratched the surface. Bleed on the page. Let it show every scar your body bears, let it bear the mark of every disappointing drive home, every anxious walk down to the CVS, every fight with someone you once thought was your soulmate. When it hurts, push it a little harder. Don't shy away from pain. It's what makes us human, after all. Like moths to light, we are drawn to people who express their loss with a boldness most of us do not afford ourselves.
Read all the time. Read everything you can get your hands on, from David Foster Wallace to grocery store romance novels. No great writer becomes great without inhaling the creativity of others.
Be honest. Be true to yourself. Sometimes you will be the bad guy in your own story. Sometimes you will make mistakes with crippling aftereffects. Sometimes your life changes, in an instant, because you made a close friend decide to walk away. These are what good stories are made of.
Young writer, do not lock yourself in a bedroom overlooking the woods and do nothing but ruminate on the pettiness of human existence. No one wants to read that story. We've seen it a million times, in a million different paperbacks. Go live. Make mistakes. Drive late at night. Take the back roads. Talk to strangers. Ride the bus. Write notes to your waitress. Be unique. Do not live for your writing; make your writing live for you.
Writers are not a portrait of sadness and self-destruction. Some are, but this is true of every profession: perhaps the alcoholic accountant is less of a romantic portrait than the alcoholic writer, but they are suffering from the same demon. Writers are people. The only thing we all have in common is as simple as the name itself. We create. We build. We bleed from ink.
We write.
