Acting Like One

"You Are a Writer, So Start Acting Like One."

At least, that's what Jeff Goins tells us to do. He believes in his message so much, he's hosting a contest for his readers at http://youareawriter.com... and he wrote a book about it.

{Go buy it. I'll wait.}

So about this contest...


What's the craziest thing you've ever done to tell the world you're a writer…to tell yourself and make yourself believe it? 

Oh boy. 

This, perhaps?

I've been a writer as long as I remember, scribbling stories about elves on ripped notebook paper in my childhood bedroom, then later, heart-bare teenage angst about boyfriends (or the lack thereof). I never stopped writing but at some point I stopped believing I could "make it" as a writer and tucked my work into journal pages and computer folders, never to see the light of day.

I poured over the craft, unleashing myself to the words, to the page, and gazing starry-eyed at the authors I admired, the ones whose name splashed across book covers in block letters, the dream I couldn't dare to dream.

Until I did.

Someone once said that people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be. I think, too, people are about as successful. Your definition of success may be different from mine, but all in all, your state of mind and what you declare about yourself has a lot to do with where you are and where you're going.

I was tired of people asking, "What do you do?" and not feeling the freedom to tell them I was a writer. I believed you weren't a writer until your name was on the cover a book and I believed I wasn't good enough for that, that I'd fail miserably and lose the only thing I was good at.  

The problem with that attitude, by the way is that writers write books. There will be no book cover if you aren't already a writer. I always knew I'd write forever, it was as much a part of me as my elbows, my eardrums…or more so. But fear paralyzed me from taking myself seriously and no one read my work. I didn't dare bring that which I loved most onto the chopping block. It was too sacred.

With no one to write for, the words became few. I talked myself into a more sensible career and tended to my family… and ached with the weight of what was trapped within.

To save myself, to save my gift, to resurrect the dream... I had to become what I already was. 

I made a choice I couldn't hide and I couldn't back down from and did what any normal, totally sane person would do and headed for the tattoo shop, branding myself with what I shied away from so easily. Making a declaration to the universe, to myself, the needle rose and fell, depositing lifelong ink beneath the skin of my wrist, blazing the badge that told the whole world. 

I am a writer.

Because when people ask about it (and everyone does), I have to declare myself to be what I am branded with. I have to present myself, despite my fears, as that which I know I am. I have to submit my work and keep trying because every day I see it, every day I explain it, and every day somebody asks what I'm working on. It's been a helluva motivator, I gotta tell ya.  

Because I fight hard against the odds, the fears, the failures and internal messages that threaten to kill the dream for me and this…this reflects the message that I cannot separate myself from writing. It's in me, it's on me, it is me.

Because when I grab the remote control or write checks or text on my cell phone, I see it. It reminds me what my hands ought to be doing. 

It was and is my only tattoo. Before I got it I hadn't published a single thing. (Daring move, I know.) I wasn't a writer yet…not by anyone else's standards, but I couldn't start there. I had to be a writer, believe I was a writer, to become a writer.

After? I published three magazine articles the month I got the tattoo, the first three I ever submitted. I started a blog. I won contests. I got sponsorships to writer's conferences. I had several pieces accepted for community book projects. I found serious joy in the thing I believe I was put here to be and to do.

After the joy, after the belief and the declaration, others started to believe it too. Publishers. Strangers. Tomorrow, I will be sending in a book proposal.

Now? The name-on-the-cover thing is just icing on the cake. It doesn't validate me or give me value, it simply confirms what I have already declared, what was declared about me when I was being created.

I am a writer.  

I don't believe anymore that you have to be published to be a writer. What I believe, though, is that you have to brand your mind and your heart with a permanence and a declaration and that you have to believe it to be true about yourself before anyone else will believe it about you. 

You are a writer.

Now start acting like one. 

Get. This. eBook. http://youareawriter.com
Do it. Right now, Slacker. Time's a' wastin'.

What's the craziest way you can think of to declare yourself a writer and announce it to the world?