How to be a Writer
What is the difference between a writer and someone who writes? I know this question sounds kind of crazy - even silly. Isn’t someone who writes - a writer? I would love to call myself a writer, but I do not believe that I am quite there yet. I enjoy to write, I love to play this game with words. I love to watch my thoughts dance around on a blank sheet of paper until they find meaning, a purpose, direction, and make sense in a place other than my mind.
I crave writing, I love writing, I breathe writing. I want more than anything to be a writer. I want to write things that people will read, remember, and talk about. So in my endless journey for answers in life I have come to the conclusion that the only way to become a writer is to write.
Write constantly. Write silly things, write stupid things, write thing that make no sense at all, and write things that make all of the sense in the world. Write in a blog, write in a journal, write in a computer, and on a napkin during lunch, and on paper. On the back of your math test, in the memo section of your cell phone. Just keep doing it.
I know this is redundant - but if you want to become a writer. WRITE!
It’s the simplest concept in the world, and yet so difficult to commit to. Consistently writing, not necessarily good, but just writing is more difficult at times than sticking to a strict diet. It follows the same patterns; initially you are motivate, you make a plan, and you stick to it. Then a few days or weeks go by and you forget to go to the gym (you forget to write) or you sneak a donut (You don’t accomplish your writing goals for the day) and then you have officially “failed” for the day. You can either give up and stop or keep going.
And with any plan, the keep going part is the most difficult thing to do. Well, I vow right here on this blog - to myself that I will keep going.
Thank you for reading! Share your thoughts with me on bluesky, mastodon, or via email.
Check out some more stuff to read down below.
Most popular posts this month
- 2024
- Reinstalling Windows at 1am
- SQLite DB Migrations with PRAGMA user_version
- My Custom Miniflux CSS Theme
- How to Disable Wayland in Debian Testing
Recent Favorite Blog Posts
This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.
- Underused Techniques for Effective Emails from Refactoring English
- Death by a thousand slops from daniel.haxx.se
- The AGI economy is coming faster than you think from Freethink
- Rolling the ladder up behind us from Xe Iaso's blog
- In Praise of “Normal” Engineers from charity.wtf
- Reports of Bluesky's death have been greatly exaggerated from The Torment Nexus
- What Would a Kubernetes 2.0 Look Like from matduggan.com
- We Can Just Measure Things from Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings
Articles from blogs I follow around the net
Occupation and Preoccupation
Here’s Jony Ive in his Stripe interview: What we make stands testament to who we are. What we make describes our values. It describes our preoccupations. It describes beautiful succinctly our preoccupation. I’d never really noticed the connection between th…
via Jim Nielsen’s Blog July 17, 2025What do we do when the facts don't matter?
As a journalist by training, I have what you might call an addiction to facts. I believe that there are things that are true and things that are not, and that we can determine one from the other through observation, rational thought, and meticulous resear…
via The Torment Nexus July 17, 2025Back to the Future
This past weekend, I decided to take a trip down memory lane and take a look at the evolution of this blog’s design over the years (with a little help from the Wayback Machine). While I’ve really enjoyed the challenge of making an obsessively backwards co…
via flower.codes July 17, 2025Generated by openring