This only went out to paid subscribers by accident. So I’m re-sending it! I apologize to the few folks who got this twice!
The other day, I found myself on my soap box in
’s Instagram DMs and realized what I was going on about would actually make a good newsletter. We all have these various goals in our heads that say we can’t call ourself a writer until XYZ happens. But I’m here to tell you, if you’re writing you’re a writer — and sometimes you’re still a writer even when you’re not writing (at the moment).But there are several factors that can stand in the way of us achieving these benchmarks we believe will give us the permission to crown ourselves as writers and often those challenges ain’t got shit to with the quality or our capabilities as writers.
TIME
Writing takes time. It just does. My life is oriented around my writing — I’ve quit jobs, moved cities and have no children all in service of carving out time for writing. It still took a decade after I started my MFA program to publish my memoir.
Despite all the things, there were many practical concerns that needed to be addressed, like making my life financially viable and building community. There are writers who are super disciplined and can bang out a book in a year. There are parents who write in the wee hours of the morning or the night or in 15-minute bursts in their car between driving their kids to their different kid activities.
But that just doesn’t work for everyone.
And sometimes, the life that comes your way is simply too great to let a book sit at the center of it. I just made a Substack note about Amy Sherald, who lost multiple loved one and received a heart transplant on the way to her now highly-lauded art career.
You need the time to put into your craft to become the writer you’re going to become and you also need time for your projects. Sometimes, that means you’ll have to make some hard choices and miss out on some things to be stationed at your desk and do the work and other times it means that manuscript gotta sit on a shelf until shit calms down for you.
COMMUNITY
If you’re new to this writing thing, you might not have many other writers in your circle. Building writing community is so crucial. I often feel like there’s a subset of writers that I’m in an invisible cohort with because we popped up on the scene around the same time and overcame similar industry terrain to get where we’re at.
If you don’t have writing community, it can feel hard to feel like a writer because your friend doesn’t want to hear you going on and on about a sentence that changed your life anymore than you want them to break down what happened on last night’s sportsball. You need folks you can nerd out with!
You also need to be adjacent to writers who are “making it” so you can feel like it’s possible for you too. And writers you can turn to to help you lick your wounds and help dig you out when you’re buried under an inevitable avalanche of rejection. People who remind you that you’ve got power in your pen. These will be the same writers who will someday hold spots at lit mags, edit anthologies or have an agent open to looking over your work.
I encourage writers who take workshops with me to connect with each other. To swap work with each other. To give each other the close read and tenderness they need to keep going. If you haven’t built writing community yet, it can be hard to feel like a writer when you’re parenting or responding to Slack messages at the day job or ushering at church — you need people in your life who eagerly, happily see you as you want to be seen.
ACCESS
Now, this is what I was yammering on at Alicia about. I’ve worked with so many talented writers and I enjoy offering 1-on-1 editing services, but I often feel like there’s a gap between where writers are and where they think they need to be to “make it.” It’s not unusual for me to turn down a 1-on-1 request because I feel like the writer, based on their draft or their skills, would only benefit incrementally by paying me for my services. I encourage them to send their work out and not let any rejections get them down.
If you’re a marginalized writer, sometimes the challenge you feel burned by on your way to becoming an established writer isn’t indicative of the caliber of your writing, the shit is unduly hard because you’re coming up against the gatekeepers of the industry. It feels hard because some is literally standing in your way.
But if you put in the time and you build the community, you’ll find a way to hop over the gate to get to the place you want to be.
Hopefully some part of this was comforting to you if you’re early (or hell, deep!) in your writing journey and have been feeling stagnant.