The inspiration to write would always come from a deep love for reading and storytelling. It is a passion pursued to breathe life into words and visualize the worlds that we live in, reality, and our imaginations.
You are a writer, and your author is not mutually exclusive concepts. You cannot be one without being the other. In becoming an author, however, you must be able to and know how to publish a book or literary work.
The process of coming up with something worth publishing can be grueling and long. Others can finish it within or under a year. Some have works that were a lifetime in the making. But regardless, authors always have common qualities no matter how long or what genre they write for.
Authors are often very patient when it comes to their craft. They can handle the random bursts of creativity and inspiration and also the lack of it.
Progress is ongoing, but it also fluctuates. There are quiet days when all that is present is peace and no rush of your work’s following passage or sequencing coming to mind. Then there are also times when all these magnificent thoughts and ideas come rushing in a thunderous flow, to the point that it can be challenging to sort them out right away. Lucky are those who have a more or less balanced experience with these two. But if it’s never consistent, it can be increasingly frustrating.
With grace and command of self, authors can go through roller coasters like this and still meet deadlines with their publishers. Some even result in meditation and research to stimulate and calm their minds to come up with something.
In the words of the late novelist George R. R. Martin, who wrote the critically-acclaimed A Song of Ice and Fire book series, there are two writers: the architects and the gardeners. Architects plan and envision their work ahead of time. They calculate each step, meticulously pick the materials to use, and stick to either a loose or centralized theme. Gardeners, however, plant a seed of an idea, letting it grow and thrive and even wither to make a masterpiece of storytelling out of it. Nonetheless, both require a tremendous amount of patience.
Authors are friends with rejection and married to improvement.
It’s challenging to get a message across when no one is telling you where you might already be and possibly going wrong with it. Ask anyone that has ever written academically, creatively, or professionally and you will not meet a single person who has never had a rejected article before. There are many kinds of editors, but they are all relentless in their criticism. It’s just the manner of delivery that differs. This is often geared toward the benefit of both the authors and a literary work’s target readers.
Grammatical errors, typographical errors, and plots with too many unreasonable loose ends are never appealing (unless they were intended in the first place). Authors often go through many corrections, drafting, sending manuscripts for approval, receiving them again with suggestions and revisions. This cycle keeps going until their work is ready to be introduced to the rest of the world. It goes through such a tedious and detailed process to ensure that authors are satisfied with their vision and readers will find the work cohesive and serving its primary purpose.
Akin to every other person, authors are like glasses half-filled. There would always be a bottomless room for growth, improvement, and learning. Even the most seasoned and displayed authors still learn from their fellow authors, critics, experiences, life, mistakes, people, and readers. The concept of improvement is something they will forever be tied to, for better or for worse.
Authors make the most straightforward concepts permutable.
In a 2020 survey, more than 44,000 active writers and authors from the United States alone. Just think of how doubled those numbers could be when you consider the rest of the world. This begs the following questions, though: how many topics can you even write about? How many times have we seen the same thing being the subject of writing?
One can write about anything. It doesn’t even have to be under the sun, and it just needs to be something we have heard of, experienced, or imagined. It’s difficult to say when libraries and book catalogs become oversaturated with the same kind of content. This is because authors are experts at permuting a simple concept.
Authors can rearrange and deliver a topic or idea in so many ways. At some point, they might accidentally resemble someone else but still be unique on their own. Each author has a signature style and tone that are derived from various sources and inspirations. They are masters at manipulating sentence structures and words, creative, and quick-witted. As the late American poet Maya Angelou once said, “You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.”
Becoming an author is a long process, possessing specific capabilities, qualities, and talents before earning the title. But it is doable and can be realized with hard work, just like other pursued passions.
