The Spanish Berry

I know I’m not the only one struggling with this. Chances are, if you’re reading beyond the title it’s because you’re asking yourself the same question. What makes a writer? And can I really call myself one?

Once upon a time I was a small girl who buried her head in a book to avoid facing the world around her. When there was too much going on elsewhere, I knew I could always retreat to my room and find peace in the quiet pages of a book.

As long as I was reading I knew I had an excuse for not being present. Reading made you smart. Reading was good. It was ok for good girls to read books.

There was nothing wrong with this picture. I loved a good story and between library cards, gifts from relatives and my parent’s collection I had access to as many as I could find the time to devour.

Books provided answers to the world. They explained why people did things. The characters’ motivations and actions were always clear; I knew not only their words, but their thoughts, too. I learnt a lot from books.

Back before we googled everything this was the way to go. If you were interested in a topic and wanted to know more, you went and found a book about it.

I don’t remember when I began to realise that someone had to write them first.

It is even less clear to me when I began to believe that someone could be me!

Writing came to me on a rainy day. Oh, I’m sure I wrote in school before then, but that writing was born out of obligation. This, this was new. This was writing born from a need, from having something to say.

I stared at the raindrops on the glass. I watched them glide down the pane, crashing into each other and becoming bigger. I watched them race to the sill, overtaking on the inside like speeding rally drivers.

The light caught in their sphered contours, sending sparkles onto the tiled floors. Some landed on red petals or green leaves and rested there a second, taking on their colours. Some pooled on the patio making puddles worthy of wellington boots.

At some point, maybe then and there, maybe a while later, my ten year old self sat down with pen and paper and wrote a poem about the rainy day, the first but certainly not the last of its kind.

I knew I had to capture the moment. I had to share what I’d seen, I had to somehow make it last.

Later, as I grew, I wrote to make sense of the world, to figure out what I was thinking, what I believed, where I stood in the grand scheme of things.

I was never great at conversation, but give me pen and paper and now I had something to say.

I wrote because I couldn’t not write. I wrote because it felt like I would burst if I didn’t.

So, what does it take to call yourself a writer?

You don’t have to be published to call yourself a writer.

You don’t have to write ‘well’ or be ‘good’ at it, to call yourself a writer.

You don’t have to write every day to call yourself a writer.

And you don’t have to have a pile of notebooks to be a writer.

Fame, fortune or recognition, may or may not come with time and practice.

But it starts with noticing and translating what you think and feel into ink and words.

As Jeff Goins says, “Becoming a writer starts with a simple but important belief: You are a writer; you just need to write.”

So congratulations! If you write, you’re a writer! Stop waiting for permission to claim the title. Let’s go and write!