I’ve been writing since I was 6 years old but having dyslexia and ADHD made the process harder. I never got the hang of punctuation, spelling, or grammar rules and my writing took a hit for it.
For a long time, I would write the occasional story but nothing ever stuck or stood out as something super amazing. I never saw the talent in my writing until recently.
I took a creative writing course in high school but other than that I was self-taught. I used to think I was the most terrible writer I knew.
I recently discovered that it’s not true. All my writing friends feel the same way I do. I want to tell you the human side of writing, not the famous well-established author's side of it. The truth. The stuff that will matter to YOU!
They always say, just do it. Just sit down and write. From my experience, THAT’S HARD! It’s hard to sit down and write every day. It’s hard to feel like you’re good at it. I’ve written on and off for 22 years and I’m still not a pro. The truth of the matter is you will never be a pro. There is no such thing. You might have ideas that come to you more easily, you might be able to form sentences more easily, but writing is too fluid to be something you can master.
I published my first story back in August of 2016. I published it and I still didn’t feel it was good enough. Neither will you. You won’t feel your writing is ever good enough. Not everyone will like it. It won’t be perfect.
The truth is writing is a craft you will hate to love. It’s a craft you will hate so much but you can’t let it go. It’s that love where no matter how pissed you get at it, you can’t walk away.
The truth is, you need to write and in my experience, the more you write the better you will get at it. The more you hate it the more you want to prove it wrong.
My experience as a writer is, in a nutshell, a long hard process of self-hate. I love every second of it and you will too.
- Jason Salvatore
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