A writer is definitively someone who writes. If that’s the case, anyone and everyone can be a writer if they put the pen to the paper, their fingers to the keys on the computer keyboard, or sit at the edge of a child’s bed and recount a story with vivid imagery and tangible emotions. But a writer is so much more than someone who just writes. A writer is a person with many worlds, characters, and thoughts spiraling inside of their imaginations at any given time.
There are several signs as the child grows up that they will probably be a writer, destined for a life of reading, writing, rejection letters, and endless critiques. At first, for me, it started out with imaginary friends. My favorite game was make believe: pretending I was someone else, in another world, somewhere far, far away from the comforts of home.
One day, it was a mermaid with a glittery green scaly tail, asking for help for her mother, stranded at the bottom of Lake Geneva. Another, it was a witch who wanted to deliver karma to bad kids and reward those who were good to all. These days, it’s in the colorful kaleidoscope like images of young people traveling the world, falling in love, and maybe a few fictional supernatural characters here and there.
You know a writer as they grow up because they’d rather sit with an empty notebook, staring at it for hours on end with absolutely not a single scribble written other than the date, instead of going out with friends for a movie or pizza. They’d rather have their heads in a book, finish said book and instead of moving forward with their lives, they’d dream up a story almost just the same, with maybe some added extra components that they wished were in the first version. A writer is not antisocial by any means, but finds comforts with what lies inside their head: the good, the bad, and the ugly.
Writers want to write the truth, they want to share the stories that entertain their own selves. They want to write falsehoods, things that are out of this world and unknown to those inhabitants of planet Earth. Writers are all of these things and more, but all writers fall under one knowingly simple yet absolutely critical rule, above all else.
No matter what genre, length, or any other defining factor, all writers write not because they have to, but because they want to. They write because when they write, the world around them shines a little bit brighter, and their hearts feel a little bit fuller. Every writer writes because the voices inside of them beg them too, and they know that there’s nothing else in the world they’d rather be doing, even if they die as a Van Gogh and their fortunes are seen long after their gravestone is placed in the ground. A writer writes because it’s what they know how to do better than anything else in the universe.
