Sure you like reading books, in fact sometimes you enjoy reading them more than living in the real world, but if you like a good story, yearning for a world written with imagination is different from creating one, right? Are you sure a writer is born, calluses on the index finger and the third finger, and it is not done? Not necessarily. American bard master Walt Whitman didn’t produce his masterpiece Leaves of Grass until he was 35 years old, and no one has yet figured out where his genius came from, almost done. Here are seven signs that you could be harboring a fugitive author inside, a writer in hiding desperate to escape.

1. You really like books. Seriously. You read under the covers as a child, not to mention in the car, on the bus, even heaven forbid at lunch while others were playing. More than a literary obsession to the limit, yours was the sad boredom that life in the real world could never reach the same heights as on the page. Perhaps your true direction in life lies in a perfectly interspersed typeface. Perhaps there you will reach your true heights.

2. As an adult, you often avoid reading. Not because he’s stopped, but because his reading standards continue to grow and, frankly, a poorly written book has let him down too many times; you’re too good a reader to write under you. A writer trapped in the closet is guaranteed to have higher standards than most; Maybe it’s time you put on the shirt that fits you.

3. It’s a cliche, but fiction is the home of cliches, so read on. You can name the books that changed your life, whose convincing and well-crafted truths and hidden insights helped you see the world in different ways, you too. . Perhaps you have a written truth to offer your world.

4. You often tell others about the flaws in what you are reading, how you think a novel could be better written. You intuitively know what makes good writing, you know if an author has something to say before you’ve worked halfway through the page. You would write book reviews if you were a writer, you exclaim sadly. Well maybe you should, grab a pen and you are.

5. When you read words, you hear the voice of the author within you; in fact, yours is the long-held belief that you somehow know the authors whose work you’ve read, even if you’ve never met them. Maybe it really does. Writing, like other art forms, is a bridge between author and reader, and poet, artist, and meditation teacher Sri Chinmoy writes that if we are aware of this bridge, we can not only enter the work of a writer, but also acquire their ability:

“When you want to create something, you want to invoke beauty to inspire you. So, in that moment, you have to identify with someone who is creating. You want to do something unique, but the kind of thing you want to do someone has already done or is doing. Only you want to get over it. So try to identify yourself with the conscience of the person who has already done the thing or with the person himself, and try to inspire you, aspiration and ability from him. If you want to write something spiritual, read my writings and identify with them. If you want to draw something, take your ideal artist and identify with their creation. “[1]

6. You long to discover the hidden meaning of things, the hidden motivations and depths in the hearts of others, the mystery of the world around you, also within you. Most good writers do, which is why they write, their fascination with life is equal to, if not greater than, writing itself. Follow the path of those writers to self-knowledge; pen in hand, start writing yourself.

7. It has always been a storehouse of facts, a traveling library of information. You can remember everything that happens to you, often astonishing your friends with an accurate memory of the events and their sequence, without really understanding why. Your mind itself is a storyteller: it reports, observes and describes the events of your day, albeit usually spontaneously, a recording whose reels have no end. Songwriter Kristin Hersh started writing songs because “if I don’t turn ideas into songs, they can get stuck in me and make me sick.”[2] Even if you don’t go to this extreme, if your mind is overflowing its limits, put your excess creativity and energy to good use; Start writing it all down. You may also want to give meditation a try and purchase a much-needed on-off switch.

According to Hersh, “songwriting is about keeping quiet rather than talking.”[3] Whether it’s songs or entire books, if you want to be a writer, now is the time to bite into the apple instead of talking about it.

Footnotes:

1.p.42, A Star Galaxy of Beauty, Sri Chinmoy, 1974

2. Kristin Hersh, Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristin_Hersh

3. Ibid.

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