I love reading. When I am asked to list my hobbies on an application, reading has always been at the top of my list. I used to get in trouble as a child in elementary school because my teacher thought I should socialize during recess instead of reading books. To me, recess was a great time to catch up on my reading. I never thought that I got enough time to read for pleasure. When you think about how life altering and important the act of reading and writing is, it really is wonderful.
It is strange to me then that most people I have met have never really thought about writing books as something that they would do. It is a distinguished and amazing craft to be able to write a book, but I also noticed that if someone who is not a writer hears you say you are trying your own hand at writing books, they will probably try to deter you.
It is a fairly widespread opinion that writing books is something that only a super special person off in the distance who you don’t know personally can do. I encountered this sort of negative feedback when I worked of all places, at a book wholesaler. One of the men who worked in the warehouse and who was from another country asked me one day what I really wanted to do. I had almost completed a degree in creative writing in college but I was taking a year or so off to make some money before I returned to finish up. I told him I’d always wanted to write books. He laughed at me. I was hurt by this of course, but then in thinking about it I realized that he had probably been subject to people not taking his own aims seriously all his life. He didn’t know my background, or what my mind was like and he really had no idea who I was or what I could do. Only I really knew that.
It is definitely hard to keep going on in the face of all the people who would deter you in your goal of being an artist or a writer. But no one ever said life would be easy and sadly, we live in a world where most people are told by the adults in their lives when they are kids that they can’t really do what they want to. I think it would be a much happier place to live, this world, if people had a lot of positive self belief and passed this on to others. I wish it were more like that.
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