Why I Want to Be A Writer

When I was a child, I wanted to be a journalist. I didn't know how to get into it, and I thought it was the only way to be a writer. I found out later that the people who write books were also children at one point, with those same dreams - to write for a living.

When I realised I didn't need to study journalism, and that I didn't necessarily want to write news pieces for a living, I turned my attention to what really mattered to me at the time: fiction. I started writing a book, and I wanted to do that for a living then for the same reason that I want to do it now: writing a book makes me unbelievably happy. When I finish the first draft, I feel a sense of fulfilment like nothing else I've ever experienced.

Over the years, I stopped just writing novels - especially since they weren't that great at first. When I realised that lots of people asked me for writing advice over the years, I decided to write about writing. That goes back to my second childhood dream: to be a teacher.

I love teaching people about writing. I love getting to explain how I do things, and why I do them, and how else things can be done if that doesn't work out. If my years in college taught me anything about education it's that everyone has their own way of learning. That affects how people write, too. Planning Before Writing is clear evidence of why I want to be a writer. It's split up with different methods of planning a book that address different ways of thinking.

Writing lets me deal with complicated issues that I've needed to read about in my own lifetime. It's helped me put to words the stories that I feel need to be told, and has helped me create lessons for other writers to develop their craft.

To put it all quite simply, the reason I want to be a writer is to reach out to people. If I can do that full-time, writing stories and books on writing (for now - I have other interest areas I'd love to explore in the future), and if I can earn a living from it, then I'll not just be earning money from what started as a hobby, from something that I love doing for the sake of doing it, but I'll be helping people. There's first draft fulfilment, and there's changing lives fulfilment, and the latter is the driving force that keeps me going, that makes me want to be a writer full-time.