I’ve been coming up with stories or ideas for stories since I was a kid. Probably the same as everybody else… It wasn’t until the last few years when I thought I’d like to tell stories that I really thought about being a writer. To that end, a lot of advice has been given and mostly consists of the “just write something” mentality. That is easy to say for someone who has been through the process, but most advice doesn’t actually get into the what and why.
If you’re like I was when first getting started, you feel awkward about the process itself. Of course, the question of “Where do I start” comes up, but that is really secondary when it comes right down to it. Which also leads to the statement “you have to write every day”. When I thought about these things together, my first thought was “but if I feel awkward, I don’t really feel inspired to write or create something”. At which point I would stew over it for a few minutes and think about the fact that everything I have seen has shown me that in order to write, the “muse” must be active and channeling through me. That is what we see and are told to expect when writers are portrayed. So I would wait and now and then would sit down and see if it was still hard to come up with the actual words rather than just a vague idea but was mostly disappointed that, despite my apparent creativity in coming up with the story ideas, I just wasn’t getting inspired to actually write. After having done some research on the writing craft, my opinion on that last concept is that it is crap.
Now, I don’t know if it is the mentality of “if you really want or want to do it, you will find a way” or if it is some form of unconscious gate-keeping or whatever but nobody really tells you right up front that, like anything that you do when it is new to you, you have no actual “muscle memory” for it and that is why it feels weird. Almost everything I have ever done is something I have taught myself… at least when I first started out. After all, everybody knows that learning, say something technical, is completely different from learning to paint or write. You should already have some natural talent of affinity, or it isn’t something that you could really be good at. Sorry, but having tried both with at least some natural talent, that is bullshit.
I started my adult life knowing what I wanted to do; work in the computer field. I have done that for around 30 years and when I first started I had literally no knowledge or ability. All I had was the desire to learn it because I found it interesting. My journey began by literally going into department stores and playing with the display models. Back then, (the mid-1980s) computers were very different and nowhere near as user friendly as they are now. I quite literally just started trying different key combos and mouse clicks just to see what would happen. Then through trial and error taught myself how not only to use it but to break it and fix it as well. I didn’t get any formal training until later and didn’t go to college for it until I was in my 30s and had spent years doing it professionally. My point to this description of my technical skill is that doing it was no different than my natural artistic ability. That said, the actual process of writing is not the artistic part of writing… Putting a story on the page is a technical process and must be treated like one. You can come up with a thousand ideas, but the implementation of those ideas is technical no matter what the subject matter is. Computer programmers are creative when they envision what they want and are technical when they write the code, the same as writers are creative when they envision a story and technical when they write the actual words.
So yes, becoming a writer is completely different than being creative and must be treated as such. That, more than any other reason, is why you should write every day. To create “muscle memory” and to practice and learn to use a technical skill you have not normally used. It doesn’t matter if you write for five minutes or 500 words. All that matters is that you write, or type, or dictate. The method you use to get words to paper/document does not matter. Nor does it matter whether you outline or not. All that matters is the act of doing it.
By the way, if you haven’t thought about it yet: the writing part is not connected to the creation part. A person who does not outline has still already thought about and therefore created their story before they write down the actual words. The details are what they are thinking about while they write.
I have found that my own process is somewhere in-between. I come up with ideas and then refine the ideas to greater and greater detail as I go, but use an outline type structure and each level of the outline has more and more detail as I go down. Which I believe is still different from the actual writing act, even though it feels like writing. There are technical things I don’t do, such as dialog and description, even though I am detailing the story all the way down to within parts of chapters in my “outline”.
Thus I am becoming a writer and not just someone who has ideas for stories the same way I had worked on becoming a computer technician when I started a 30 year career as what I like to refer to as a computer wizard (it really is just all a kind of magic isn’t it?).