Aspiring Artists
Yesterday my friend Julio and I were discussing “aspiring” artists. His sister is a photographer – amateur but talented. He said that people were always suggesting to her that photography isn’t really an art or a skill – that it’s just pointing and clicking that anyone could do.
That’s a common attitude: “Well, anyone could do that. I could do that!” In some people, that attitude very quickly progresses into, “She’s getting paid to do that? I can do that! I should get paid to do that, too!”
And that’s fine. There is such a thing as a “natural”, or a person with innate aptitude at something they’ve never tried. However, most people realize that photography isn’t “easy” after they try it for themselves. Or, sadly, after they hire someone who thought it was “easy” to take, say, their wedding pictures.
I meet a lot of aspiring writers. In very general generalizations, they come in two flavors.
The first is the person who says, “Hey – some of my friends write. I’ve seen them do it. I could do that. I want to be a writer, too. Now let me call my writer friends and ask them what I need to do to have the same level of success as they have. All I really need is advice on how to come up with an idea and how I should go about putting it on paper. Oh, and their publishers’ names and phone numbers, so I can get my piece published!”
The second is the person who usually doesn’t even tell me that they write. Or, they tell me, “I write some stuff, but it’s only for fun and it’s just stupid, anyway.” Or “I’ve written some things, but I’m not a real writer. I’ve never been published.”
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that if you’re over 30 and you’ve never written anything before, you’d probably be more successful at a career other than writing. If you don’t like to read, you’d probably be happier as something other than a writer. If you don’t have any ideas of things to write, but you’re eager to reap the fame and riches that you imagine authors must automatically get, then you should pass up the slow road of writing and go straight to the quick road by starting a rock band!
Just kidding.
When I was a teenager, I wanted to be a rock star. I asked my dad to buy me a guitar. He said to me, “Do you want to become a musician, or do you just want to be one?”
After learning a few chords on a borrowed guitar and singing a few gigs with a high school band, I still wasn’t famous and had gotten tired of practicing all the time. And I understood what my dad had meant. Now I’m writing, because that’s something I’ve been practicing on my own since I was five, anyway.
If you write in your spare time for fun or just for yourself, then you’re already a writer. Nothing can change that. Will you be published? Maybe. Keep trying. Or don’t. Because you’re already a writer either way.
If you just decided to start writing last week, then don’t ask me for advice. Yet. Wait til you write something, first, okay?
