18 Signs You're Probably (Definitely) A Writer

Hey!

Remember that song from Les Mis?

Do you hear the pages sing, singing the words of unfinished works?

Are you a fearful, doubtful writer hiding from the toxic jerks!

They are ignoramus jocks feeding your creative blocks.

But you’ve a million drafts to finish anywaaaaay!

Yeah.

Yeah, me too.

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So maybe you’re one of those comrades who’ve been wondering recently:

“Could I... I mean, do you think it’s possible that I might, y’know, like, be...

... a writer?”

Or perhaps, under the reeling storm of late capitalism, you find yourself doubting whether you’re still a writer - what with your student debt and underpaid internship.

In either case, I get it. Fear happens. Unfolding ecopocalypse will do that to you.

Which means it’s time to review that trusty list of our kind’s most infamous traits. What do you say, huh? Let’s rediscover why writing is indeed the right (see: write) fit for you. * wink *

Whether you pursue the field professionally, as a hobby or as a reflective practice (or as an incendiary weapon against the one percent), having a little conviction in your identity as a writer provides some assurance in the dark moments of doom and gloom when we question our every life decision.

But the thing is: Writers typically share a range of (fairly uncommon) tendencies. In a world as precarious and socially atomised as ours, remembering you’re part of a community can provide much-needed consolation. And more than an effervescent boost of existential enthusiasm for flourishing the fuck anyway!

Remember who you are, wordsmith! You belong to that special tribe of weirdos that stretches across generations and peoples – a whole legacy of creative souls whose way with words marks them as among the greatest contributors to culture all over the world.

Be proud. Be brave. It’s time for your favourite against-all-odds game show-formatted introspective montage:

“You Know You’re Probably A Writer If You Are…”

* drum roll *

1) Naturally Solitary

“Back away from the door. Slowly. There’s a reason."

Writers famously enjoy our alone time.

Sure, we value our relationships. But it’s quality over quantity for us. We connect way less often, in far smaller groups. We usually prefer tranquility to crowds, anonymously scribbling away, far from the bustle of those around us. Solitude is our creative sanctuary, our temple beyond time - our soulful sex spaceship on a queer-ass quest to artistic liberation from the inside out!

So shush. We’re writing.

2) Ethically Motivated

Atrocities. Injustice. Systemic violence. Catastrophe. Melodramatic love triangles.

Writers are typically energised by matters of moral importance. There’s a certain emphasis on the fact that something about the story, the article or technicolour pantomime about the Three Musketeers matters. Aspiring to the good life, finding meaning in existence, treating others with dignity. Our writing isn’t trivial - it’s ass-deep in the real shit.

Ethical and political concerns animate us as artists of the word, and more often than not inspire our most profound and innovative works.

“A World Beyond White Supremacy”. Tell me that doesn’t make you wanna write?

3) Socially Sensitive

Aliens, aliens! Everywhere you go!

The web of relationships that characterise our lives appears to us writers as an uncanny realm of mystery, wonder and danger. Our family, friends, neighbours and colleagues, even strangers: all people are complex and fascinating to us.

We observe others - nay: examine others. The nuances of their body language, the inflections of their speech. The attitudes implicit in their makeup or watches, the deeper nature to which their suburb-ready 4x4s allude.

Ours is a game of silent study with the world as our subject. And we never stop playing.

4) Regularly Ambivalent

Don’t get me wrong: we’re passionate about all sorts of things. Trust me, you do not want to quarrel with a writer.

But a great deal of the writing life means slipping into the subjectivity of others. We feel a certain proximity to the sensibilities of people very different from us – people whose beliefs, backgrounds and lifestyles stand in contrast to (or even threaten) our own. We tend towards something not entirely unlike multiple personality disorder, hearing in our heads voices and ideas that don’t feel truly our own.

Of course, we shouldn’t trivialise the struggle of those who do suffer from MPD, nor assume ourselves to enjoy privileged insight into others’ minds. But you’d be hard-pressed to find a poet who can’t see a disagreement from both sides, or a novelist who doesn’t find their books populated with convincingly portrayed people vastly different from themselves.

Everyone contains multitudes, but writers contain infinities.

5) Profoundly Affected by Reading

I’m just saying, the next time someone interrupts my reading with a line like, “Since you’re doing nothing,” or starts up a conversation because it seems like I’m not busy, I’m gonna mail them a conclusion to their life story and sign it: Jehova God Almighty.

Fact: Something about reading feels deeply right to us.

It may be the tactile presence of the book between our hands, or the seductively rich immersion it provides. But whatever the reason, the experience of reading moves writers in a way that is unique, wondrous and even overwhelming.

It’s like swimming in the only substance for which writers have gills. Whether they’re books, magazines, articles or comic books, written works speak to us like few other things can. And we rely on them - to stay sane - before we can make time to speak to you.

6) Either Writing or Craving Writing

At its sharpest, a writer’s sensibility bears an uncomfortable likeness to that of a fanatic. There’s a reason fundamentalists are called Bible-bashers, right?

Books. Make you. Bat-shit.

When we’re not thrashing it out at the keyboard or notebook, we find ourselves submerged in the throes of a vicious frenzy. So compelled are we by the experience of writing – the thrill of conjuring whole lives, crafting whole worlds, embedding ourselves in the almost musical flow of words – that we become manic and obsessive. We’re like addicts, and without our literary drug, we are gripped by withdrawals.

Fortunately, writing can be accommodated into a life of loving relationships, regular exercise and proper nutrition, along with sensible financial choices and engagement in the broader community. It needn’t wreck our lives in any shape or form.

But suffice it to say, at least from time to time, every writer starts to feel a little bit like rabid werewolf tearing down every hut in the village. Except the library.

7) Imaginative

It’s not merely that we love to imagine – rather, imagining is how we think.

Ideas are our toolkit, our vocabulary, our raw materials. They’re what we use to make sense of the world. (And save ourselves from the mind-pulping monotony of the techno-bureaucracy.)

Landscapes and people, the ethical parameters and social forces which shape our lives – all of these are choreographed across our hearts and heads like swirling sprites, generating new architectures of possibility, revealing new realms of adventure. (No, you can’t cure this. Yes, it’s contagious.)

Stories happen to us as surprisingly as they present to a reader browsing a shelf in a bookstore. We don’t make the rules. But we do love to break them.

8) Emotionally Perceptive

Feelings stand out to writers like an extra spectrum of colour. (Did you see that flash of childhood trauma totally invade this conversation and swallow Justine’s brownie whole? No, I swear it wasn’t me!)

The world of the writer is textured by an added dimension that others seem to miss. The minutia of someone’s wardrobe, the rhythms and tones of their speech, the way they fidget or cough. Everything carries a certain psychological gravity, a piece in the jigsaw that makes up their inner lives as much as it does their outer ones.

We hear the grief in hesitation, the fear in one’s laugh, the joy in one’s silence. It is the mark of a writer to hear the emotional overtones of even the smallest moments: a leaf trembling on a branch, a child dusting off a chest, an empty bottle glinting on a street corner.

A flag burning overhead.

9) Philosophical

Writers tend to have an analytical side, particularly for pondering the big questions: What is human nature? Is there a life after death? When’s socialism coming?

Our intellectual musings often crystallise into some of our most significant creations, owing both to their depth of substance and their vivid portrayal. We may not always enjoy the theoretical strictness of formal academic philosophy, which spares little room for the radical empathy of the poet, but our contemplative predilections find their way into our work anyway.

It’s okay to be smart. (So seriously, do you know when socialism’s coming?)

10) In Love with Words

For writers, words aren’t just words. They’re words.

Not hollow, transparent vessels of meaning, but majestic artifacts evolving before our eyes. Words emanate a chimeric energy, a manifold mixture of moods.

A phrase can writhe with aesthetic surplus - it triggers in us a unique and momentous reaction. The right word aptly placed can spark an avalanche of memory and ignite a whole new perspective that catalyses a life-changing transformation in a reader. (The wrong word, by contrast, grates across our minds like a brick over a slab of cement - or a president whose fleece was white as snow.)

Language is the quiet music of all people. Properly wielded, it can enchant, inspire, arouse and enlighten. Handled clumsily and it scorches our eyes with lopsided grammar, offending our literary taste buds with its muddled phrases.

Goodness, that was dramatic. But, my god, you know it’s true.

11) Profoundly Affected by the Creative Arts

A dancer to a writer is a celestial pulse, the heartbeat of the cosmos. A painting is a portal into ideology; a play, a world unto itself - music: the language of the soul. (I could do this all day.)

Writers seem to feel an uncommon connection to other artistic media besides those strictly literary. In fact, we often find ourselves dabbling in several.

Together these form together a constellation of expressions, harmonising in their unique asymmetrical ways to evoke what is otherwise beyond what can be said, known or shared. Like the revolutionary spirit, the arts know no boundaries, and envelope us all in their dazzling enigma.

12) Reflective

And I don’t mean navel-gazing. We process life through our writing, don’t we?

Your fears about the future; your past mistakes. What your mother said, what your father did. What you made for lunch. What’s happening on the news-My cat, my cat, my caaaat!

Everything we experience we seem to filter through our journals, our poetry, and the scenes in our stories.

Fine! Keep the goddamn remote!

13) Prone to Growing Mentally Ill When You Don’t Write

Oh, yeah. You know exactly what I mean.

It’s like a total biopsychosocial constipation. Getting cranky if you missed a day is one thing. And a haggard week without writing is another. But months of anxious agony? Years of depressive desperation? We’ve all been to the wasteland of living apart from our art. It’s barely living at all.

Whether due to alienation, discrimination, financial woe or any other species of (socially avoidable but structurally reproduced) trauma, creative blocks stifle a part of ourselves that simply cannot survive when caged. It’s torture, and the longer we deny ourselves the space to create, the faster it spreads.

Like colonialism!

14) Frequently Being Praised for Your Writing

It’s okay. It’s not bragging to admit it.

You’re good. (Sometimes.) Or at least, you’ve got potential.

A smart phrase, a thoughtful appraisal of a topic - you have that special touch. Perhaps you’ve won a few prizes at school, maybe got a short something-or-other published in a college rag. Heck, even your emails feel... slick.

You’ve always had the hunger for it, a sense of the prose or prosody. A willingness to give it a shot, and to try again next time.

People see it. And they like it. And you should too. It’s awesome.

15) Curious About the Craft of Writing Well

How do they do it? What makes this chapter read so convincingly? What makes this stanza so profound?

Diction, vocabulary, structure, perspective, tone, setting, metre - all the nuts and bolts, the nitty gritty of making writing work, tickle a certain technician in each of us. We want to take good writing apart and put it back together again.

As Chuck Wendig says: “Storytelling is an art, but writing is a craft.” We want to hack writing. We want to get it, mess with it, master it. We want to try every trick in the book - because making the book is the trick itself.

16) Used to Everything Changing in Your Life, Except Your Writing

Well, you know what they say: “Empires rise (yeugch!), empires fall (yay!), but there’s always another story.”

Oh, they don’t actually say that? That last bit’s just tacked on for the purposes of this article? Bite me.

The point is: Nothing stays the same, except that you write.

Friends come and go. We gain qualifications, we lose jobs, we earn salaries, our bosses earn more. Heartbreaks and headaches, travels and travails. In life, everything changes. But not writing.

It’s like the old saying goes: “Change is the only constant... and writing too.”

17) Your Life is Filled with Writers

Birds of a feather, as they say.

The people you admire, the people you respect, some of your friends - maybe even a parent. My Goethe! There’s a poster of Samuel Delany in your locker! If that’s not a sign, then... well, then this item’s not all that pertinent to you. (And de Saussure and most of modern linguistics has a big fat mess to clean up.)

Writers naturally gravitate towards others of our kind, finding great pleasure in the mingling of like minds. To hold fellow writers in our company is a way of coming home.

18) You’re Reading This Article

That’s right, comrade.

Let’s face it: people who aren’t writers don’t sit around wondering whether they’re writers or not. It’s just us - the scaredy-cats cowering from the truth of our calling.

And that’s okay: fear tells us exactly what we cherish most. Just make sure you don’t walk the way it’s pointing. You should be headed right back where you came from.

* points to incomplete manuscript *

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Did I miss something?

What have I left out?

Nightmares? Day-dreams? Freudian slips? Feel free to comment your additions to the list, or hit me up at nicholasadawn.author@gmail.com.

Thanks for dropping by!

<3